Eavesdropping was something JoAnn and I got good at when her older sister, Beth, still lived at home and necked with her boyfriend at every opportunity. We learned a lot about life that year, not as much as Beth, but enough to keep things interesting. JoAnn grew African violets and had a sensitive grower’s ear that picked up conversations from across a noisy room. She plugged into Wes and Sharrell like a ham radio operator.
“It’s not bad,” JoAnn said, stroking her ear for better volume. “They’re talking about corn. What it’s used for, how it grows, you know.”
Now, my experience with romance has been, so far, slim. But that hasn’t kept me from thinking about it. I knew that when a boy and a girl got cuddly the subject would not be corn.
“This is very bizarre,” JoAnn said, watching her prey. “She’s really pumping him about corn, Ellie. What’s she up to?”
We looked at each other and suddenly knew. Sharrell Upton, who had won every beauty title in Rock River from the age of six, was a favored contestant for the coveted title of Sweet Corn Coquette. The winner got a thousand-dollar savings bond and a two-hundred-dollar gift certificate at Loward’s Department Store plus all that adulation. And what would impress the judges most during the agricultural questioning?
“Why do you want to be Sweet Corn Coquette?” the judges always asked each contestant. A sampling of former winners’ answers showed a misunderstanding of corn and its merits:
“Because I think it’s a wonderful vegetable, Your Honor.”
“Because sweet corn makes me proud to be an American.”
“Because corn is…well…gee…it’s juicy and practical.”
This part of the contest always gave growers a big hoot, but a contestant who could answer thoughtfully and look great in a yellow chiffon dress would be a shoo-in. Sharrell held on to Wes’s arm like it was the first ear of the season. I plotted my attack.
“How’s it going?” It was Richard.
“Great. Really great.”
Richard cleared his throat, picked an orange from a fruit bowl, and slapped it into his left hand over and over, like a baseball. “So,” said Richard, watching Wes and Sharrell in the corner.
I looked at JoAnn, who shrugged, meaning they were still talking corn. It hadn’t occurred to Wes, I’m sure, that corn and pumpkins were both native American vegetables and simply went together because God had planned it that way. Ask any Wampanoag (or was it Sioux?)—he was eating corn and pumpkins and doing just fine for hundreds of years before those sneaky Europeans arrived, who were probably Sharrell’s relatives. Ask any Pilgrim how he survived the first long, cold winter. Corn and pumpkins—that’s what he’ll tell you. You can’t fight nature. Or destiny.
This gave me hope, and I was feeling pretty smug with centuries of agricultural heritage behind me. Sharrell had no right to take my place. I stormed the gates, sat down next to Wes, looked Sharrell dead on, and sprayed.
“So, Sharrell,” I said, feeling my seams tighten, “how’s the beauty contest business?”
“Whatever do you mean?” said she.
“I mean the Sweet Corn Coquette contest. You have entered, haven’t you?”
Sharrell was smiling like a big fake and Richard was inching closer. I jangled Mother’s earrings for strength and twirled my braid.
“Well, of course I’ve entered.”
“What,” asked Wes, amused, “is a Sweet Corn Coquette?”
“It’s the very highest honor for beauty contestants,” Sharrell said. “The Sweet Corn Coquette represents corn farmers in the entire region.”
“Doing what?” Wes continued.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“How,” asked Wes, “does a Sweet Corn Coquette represent corn farmers in the region?”
“Well…” She was floundering. “By making appearances…by smiling, you know…”
“Smiling,” said Wes.
“And waving,” Sharrell continued. “From floats and things. And we eat corn, of course, at the dinners and festivals, but without butter, so it won’t slop down your dress. That’s a little contest secret.” She giggled.
Wes was watching Sharrell strangely, maybe seeing the light. “I always wondered what those contests were like,” I said. “How do you enter?”
Sharrell shook her mane of corn-blond hair: “I just filled out a little card and—”
“I think,” said Richard, joining in, “what we want to know is what are the qualifications? Do you have to be a grower or at least know something about corn to represent the farmers?”
“Well,” she said, batting her eyes, “they never asked me any of that.”
“Ah,” said Richard, flipping his orange, “I know something about corn.”
“Probably not as much as Wes here,” Sharrell purred.
“Probably not,” Richard agreed, “but probably more than a Sweet Corn Coquette contestant.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” she snapped. “Wes’s been teaching me real good.”
Richard smiled and held his orange out like a microphone: “Two questions, Sharrell, and the Sweet Corn Coquette crown can be yours.” A small crowd had gathered, mostly of average-looking girls who hated Sharrell’s guts.
“Question number one,” he shouted. “When is corn planted? Please think before you answer.” Richard checked his watch as Sharrell, not knowing, wiggled in embarrassed silence.
“Time’s up,” said Richard, turning to the crowd. “Does anyone know the answer?”
“Spring!” shouted several people in unison.
“Correct,” said Richard. “Spring. Remember that, Sharrell. It’s important to know when corn is planted if you’re going to wave from floats and represent corn farmers in the entire region. Now for question number two: Why do you want to be this year’s Sweet Corn Coquette? Please think before you answer.”
Sharrell stood in fury. “I don’t have to take this!” she cried, and stormed off.
“Correct!” Richard shouted. “Because she doesn’t have to take this.”
The kids laughed appreciatively. Wes shook his head in disbelief. Richard walked away peeling his orange like a pitcher who had just nailed a no-hitter. Wes and I were on the couch by Mrs. McKenna’s plastic palm, alone, the closest I had ever sat to a boy in my whole life. I felt wonderful, then ugly, and definitely guilty.
“I guess that was mean,” I said.
Wes shrugged, looking at his shoes. They were good farmer’s shoes—old, practical, caked with mud.
“She’ll probably win,” I said. “She always does.”
“And represent the great American corn farmer?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Somebody has to. I guess.”
“Nobody has to,” said Wes, looking right at me.
I wanted to tell him that I understood and forgave him, that growers take pride in being independent and don’t go outside for help or understanding even when they really need it. I knew he loved nature and didn’t need flash. The closest bond we had was the soil, and there was plenty of that on his shoes.
“My grandparents were farmers,” I said.
“Mine, too.”
“My father skipped the line and left the growing to me,” I explained, not sure why I wanted him to know that.
“Yeah, my dad hated farming, too,” Wes said. “He’s a sales manager. That’s why we moved up here. I didn’t like it in the beginning, but it’s not so bad. It kind of grows on you.”
It does indeed.
Dad, of course, was at the McKennas’ at exactly eleven o’clock, when the party ended. The first parent there. Wes was talking to Grace when Dad shoved Richard and me out the door. We waved good-bye, and Grace winked at me, meaning she would get the lowdown on everything and talk to me tomorrow.
The sky was clear, black, and filled with stars—the kind of sky I remembered as a child when Dad would wake me up to see the constellations in perfect display. Dad gave me his love for stars. It was the only part that stuck with him from his life on
the farm. Dad said he would lie out in the fields as a boy, counting stars trillions of miles out in space. He had an astronomy club with four other boys. They called themselves the Knights of the Night, a totally uncool name, but one of the boys became a space engineer at NASA. You never know how nerds are going to turn out.
Richard, Dad, and I stood on Mrs. McKenna’s lawn, hushed under the stars, taking time to get our eyes used to the darkness. Dad’s eyes searched the night sky like he was trying to solve a mystery. We found the October constellation Pegasus, the Flying Horse. It had four bright stars at the corners. Dad counted eighteen faint stars inside its square. Richard said the sky reminded him of a baseball stadium at night—high praise. I remembered Dad telling me to pick the star I wanted and it would be mine. As a child, I never believed that could happen, but tonight I felt lucky. I pointed to a small star hanging left of the McKennas’ chimney and took ownership.
Dad laughed, opened the car door for me, and helped me inside. “Good party?” he asked hopefully as we sped off.
Richard said something about the greatness of Mrs. McKenna’s butter pecan seven-layer cake. I said “Mmmmm,” and looked out the window. My star was following us. It waited over Richard’s house as we dropped him off, then trailed us home. I had picked well.
“Well,” Dad said, “I’m sure the boys were buzzing around you tonight.”
I laughed and blushed sort of, because he had never said that to me before. I walked out back to Max.
“Do you mind, Dad? I just need to—”
“Ellie,” he sighed, “it’s late now and—”
“Five minutes, okay?”
He sighed in defeat and went inside.
I crouched near Max and checked his runoff ditch, my khaki slacks pushing at the seams. I wondered where Wes was, what he was thinking about. I lifted the reemay cloth off, touched his skin, and in honor of the evening, gave it a go.
“Listen,” I whispered. “It’s me. Ellie.” I felt dumb doing this, but Wes had trusted me with his family secret because he knew I had guts. “I want you to know, Max, that I’m proud of how strong you are.” I couldn’t think of more to say so I squatted there as Max soaked that in. “I know you can do it, Max,” I continued, “because you’re a champion. It’s important you know that because you’re going to have to stretch a little more so we can beat the daylights out of Cyril Pool at the Weigh-In, who is thirty-five and a world-class sludge.”
My star hung over us, which I really appreciated, because the next part was not as easy to say. “Not meaning to bring up negatives, Max, but Cyril’s pumpkin’s a deep orange color, deeper than you. Not that you’re not great-looking, you understand, and granted, weight’s the thing they go by, but you do look sort of pale. Good color just makes the whole win more dramatic, so if you could work on that, too, I’d appreciate it. Think orange, Max. Big, bright, and orange. Got it?”
I stood up, and my pants ripped completely across the seam. It was inevitable, but for once in my life, my timing had been decent.
It was Sunday, 7:00 A.M., eight hours after Dad had dragged me from the Party of the Year, and Grace still hadn’t called to report on Wes. I had called the McKennas’ house fifteen minutes earlier, figuring they’d be awake since the sun was, after all, up. They weren’t.
I called JoAnn Clark, who I knew would be up—people who grow African violets sleep lightly. We decided that Wes, being of good farm stock, had probably been awake for hours walking the fields, thinking about what a delightful girl I was and what a deadhead Sharrell really was—and he’d never even seen me with my perfect makeup job. I made Dad coffee and baking powder cheese biscuits, of which I was determined to eat only two bites. Cheese biscuits made Dad feel loved and appreciated, which kept him peaceful during breakfast. The Rock River Pumpkin Weigh-In and Harvest Fair was twenty breakfasts away, and you can bet my father was going to be swimming in warm, cheesy heaven.
Dad was attacking one of his Important Life Goals: running seven miles in under forty minutes. He’d trimmed his speed down to forty-two minutes, which I told him was a miracle for a person of his extreme age. He flopped in the kitchen dripping wet, checked his watch, and collapsed.
“It’s conceivable,” Dad said, wheezing, “that I could be dead.”
I poured coffee into his “Forty Isn’t Old If You’re a Tree” mug and got myself a glass of water.
“You look tired,” I said, being kind. Actually, Dad’s face had that dark, craggy look that Abraham Lincoln got during the Civil War. Dad had added three new clients to his schedule last month, which meant he was working round the clock when he wasn’t running. He wasn’t sleeping well, either, but then, he hardly ever did.
“Maybe you should cut back, Dad.”
Dad did not believe in the concept of rest. He closed his eyes, tensed his muscles, and breathed deeply.
“A harnessed mind,” he said, “can change the body.”
I considered my body and knew the only thing that would change it was basic starvation. He did severe stretching exercises to prove his point. I took the perfectly browned biscuits out of the oven and told my body it wasn’t hungry. This concept didn’t take. I ran from the kitchen a broken person, with a cheese biscuit clenched in my fist.
Everything went down the toilet in October (especially my grades) because pushing a winning squash to the limit took everything I had. Miss Moritz was pumping up for her fall extravaganza: “The Major Battles of World War II and How They Make Us Feel Today.” She wanted us to “connect with the emotion of the battlefield because history isn’t just facts, it’s feelings.” My feelings for the battlefield weren’t deep.
Dad didn’t appreciate that the next twenty days were the most important in all of the pumpkin-growing competition. This was when a giant could gain ten pounds per day or die in rot, and then where were you? Out in the cold, that’s where. Dad picked homework over squash nurturing every time. Cyril Pool didn’t have this pressure. Cyril did have stupidity working against him, which gave me hope, since Cyril didn’t even know he was stupid.
It was 7:32. Grace still hadn’t called to tell me about Wes. I checked the phone to make sure it was working. Maybe Grace’s phone wires had been cut by terrorists.
Now it was 7:47. The smell of Dad’s remaining biscuits filled the house, and I picked off another one. I tried the phone line three minutes later, when three gunshots sounded in the distance. Gunshots weren’t heard in Rock River except when the VFW went duck hunting, which they never did on Sunday. This could be trouble.
Dad and I ran outside. More gunshots were blasting. An old truck sped around the corner. It was pursued by Mannie Plummer in her gingham housecoat, holding a rifle screeching fire. “They took it!’ she screamed, pointing down Bud DeWitt Memorial Drive. “They stole it right in plain daylight! They stole my baby!”
Roxye and Phil Urice came out of their house because Mannie had flopped down on their lawn in her grief and they had just fertilized it real good yesterday morning. Mannie didn’t notice, and Roxye and Phil weren’t about to tell her. Mrs. Lemming stuck her head out her front door, saw Mannie slumped on the newly fertilized lawn, and within minutes waddled down the street with a jug of cider and paper cups, which she passed out to the small crowd that had gathered. Mannie was crying bad, the first casualty of the season. Roxye went to call the police, but it wouldn’t do any good.
“I’m too old to have another one,” Mannie groaned, cradling her rifle, which Phil took gently from her. She was sixty-five, her back was giving out, and we all knew she was right.
Mrs. Lemming said it was such a shame, such a waste; Roxye said the sheriff was on his way and they’d had one taken earlier this morning at Gloria Shack’s farm—a three-hundred-pounder.
“Mine weighed two hundred and some,” Mannie sobbed. “My biggest yet.”
This was a rough break for Mannie. Her parakeet had croaked three months earlier and she was just getting back to enjoying life. We were quiet out of respect for her l
oss, but fear gripped my heart at the thought that terrorized every giant-pumpkin grower in the area. The pumpkin thieves had begun their murderous ride! They could strike anywhere, anytime, slashing vines, lifting helpless giants from their homes. Out-of-town department stores bought, schools bought, lesser harvest festivals bought, and selfish millionaires on country estates that just wanted the pumpkins for themselves. The going rate was $1.10 a pound. Nobody, it seemed, could stop the thieves. I wondered if they had Cyril’s address.
But Max! I hugged Mannie hard and ran back home, leaving Dad with the thing he loved most: a group that needed motivating.
Max sat safe and untouched in the garden, soaking up the morning sun. We’d been spared for now. I watered him well and checked for kidnappers. Two pumpkins snatched in one morning. This was bad, very bad.
“Did you see them, Max?” I whispered. “Did you see the bad men?”
Max couldn’t give a description, but I had my suspicions, and they were all named Dennis. Dennis Hickey. A mean, hulky nineteen-year-old junior who flunked eighth grade three times and was passed on to Rock River High like the Asian flu when his five-o’clock shadow made his thirteen-year-old classmates so nervous they started calling him “sir.” In high school, Dennis could not pass remedial freshman English, but managed to get his driver’s license and a smelly old pickup that was just the right size for squash snatching. Last October Dennis had shown up at school waving a wad of money and cracking jokes about pumpkin pie.
Richard defended Dennis because they played on the same baseball team, and where baseball was concerned, Dennis was a good sport. He was also a good first baseman who growled at every runner he tagged, scaring some to their knees because he had three front teeth missing. I pointed out to Richard that Dennis also kicked bunnies and threw rocks at squirrels. He ate a caterpillar once on a bet, and spray-painted First Presbyterian Church’s Christmas manger iridescent purple when the minister told him he was “not the right type” to play Joseph in the holiday pageant.
“He has a great arm,” Richard said.