Scroll of Jawns / Ep. 7
jawn one.
I take all the pumpkins from Halloween and I drop them off the side of the front porch. They thud down into the dead beds down there between the house and the lawn. We had a lot of pumpkins because we live in the country. We don’t pay $12 for a pumpkin from a huge box sitting at some suburban Wegmans. For $12 I can buy an entire field of pumpkins from an Amish farmer who probably prayed for six minutes before he ate breakfast this morning in the dark before the sun. Pumpkins grown by people like that last longer and look better. Country pumpkins grown by Amish farmers are purer. They’re a direct link to a bygone era when men were men and the world was vast and mysterious and unknowable/ unconnectable. Or maybe they’re not, it’s up in the air. Maybe they’re just the same as all the other pumpkins. Maybe the reason I buy so many of them every year is that they’re cheaper than hell. I drop a 20 in the honor box over by the selected gourds and corn stalks and I pull away from the fields with kids in the backseat covered in pumpkins. We picked them ourselves/ lugged them back through the rough shodden fields/ sometimes a long walk of 200 yards if you are ambitious and went hunting for the big boys way at the back of the field. They rot after I dump them overboard. In the winter they break down a little and fade and rot like the dead soldier’s must have done after Fredericksburg in December of 1862. Some got buried or hauled away, I guess, but some died over in the trees/ over in the brush behind some old stone barn or some dilapidated springhouse from when the Revolution was new. They rotted away slow in the winter grey/ their faces sinking back into their skulls/ their fingers curling up around their rifles until some kid stumbled upon the scene and gasped at the hole in the forehead and then took the gun and kept it until he to died many moons into the future. The pumpkin seeds come back sometimes and so next summer, while I’m mowing the lawn, I’ll make sure I mow around the spreading vines as they creep out across the grass, and with any luck and a bunch or rain, give us a couple of pumpkins that we grew ourselves without even trying.
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