Pumpkin

With the roarin’ hum of the horseflies and the baking midnight heat, our little patch of Texas coulda been the center of the equator. Some patcha paradise, hidden in some jungle, never t’be touched by human hands. The only thing keepin’ our land from bein’ a jungle is that there no trees here. No real ones, like those tall gnarled woods that you hear about in Colorada. Here, we have short lil’ brambles instead. Thistles, wildgrass. Pumpkins.

Fat and orange in the yellow-sick moonlight, I can just see the curve of one of their shells out the corner of my eye. The dirt’s been cleared by nameless, eyeless, thousand-legged critters durin’ the day, so now the pumpkins sit naked on a patch of dry earth. We haven’t had rain in a long while. I can taste the dust in my mouth.

I can also taste pumpkin meat— one of the big boys is split open nearby, and its guts are stinkin’ up into the cloudless night, attracting all manner of flies. They land on me: my neck, my eyes. I’m too tired to brush them away.

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear the calves cryin’, the hoofing sound of the ranch shuffling into pens. Marty’s whistle cuttin’ through the night. He oughta be in bed by now. No matter how old he gets, he’ll still be jus’ a kid. See, Marty was a miracle baby, an’ he’s still small and shriveled up from his time in Heaven. I overheard, once, a few winters ago, some stranger telling our Mom and Dad that if they took him into City, he’d be able to get the medicine he needed, an’ his lungs’d be workin’ again. Dad got real mad about that. Spittin’ like a snake, screamin’ that he wouldn’t sell his boy to slavers. We’ve heard stories about City. The fac’try, the bosses. Skin taken right off the bone. It’s not a good place to be.

Sure, we send the cows there, when it’s time for them to die, but we don’t go in City at all. We don’t even eat the canned hooves they send us back. We sell them in town. Mom says the cans are fulla poison and she knows because we used to have a sister who’d eat ‘em all the time. Mom doesn’t talk much on the days when we send out the cows. She doesn’t talk much at all.

And since I told ‘em I was gonna go off to the city, try and be a doctor to cure folks like Marty and our sister, Mom’s talked even less. She doesn’t even make a noise when we pray, or when Dad’s hands get angry with her. Boy, was he ever angry when I said I was gonna be a doctor.

The pumpkin patch had just been planted out back. One of ‘em had gotten smashed since me and Marty were fooling around, and so the horseflies were buzzing like the railroad did back in the days when it still ran through our county. Dad was already in a foul mood caus’a it. He’d been suckin’ at the bottle, lookin’ like he was thinkin’ hard.

“Michael,” he boomed out to me. “Boy, c’mere.”

I came, an’ he popped me a bottle and had me sit. Stood over me like a puffed-up scarecrow while I took a swalla.

“You listen now and you listen good,” he told me, “It’s admra’ble that you wanna be a doctor, helpin’ the sick is the Lord’s work.” Then he got real close to me and said, lookin’ ghostish, teeth like rotten corn, “But please, son. This fam’ly can’t take another loss. And we got fall season in just a week or two; we’ll need ya, Michael.”

“I know that, Dad.” I’m pretty sure I said it respectful-like, because I really did feel sorry for ‘im right then. He was lookin’ very old to me, all of a sudden. “But I am doin’ this for the family. You ain’t heard him at night?”

Marty’s cough is getting worse. It’s always bad ‘round August, but this time it sounded wet. It shakes his whole body, ribs clatterin’ ‘gainst each other. All the drought dust is killin’ him. I don’t want to see my baby brother killed by just a little dust, not if there’s medicine out there to help ‘im. Not if I can help him.

I told Dad all this, and he seem’ta listen, an’ then he got real quiet. He didn’t look at me none after that. He said, though, real quiet-like, “So you gon’ take ‘way Martin too?”

That wun’t how I put it, but yes, I said. I’m gonna make Marty better. We’re gon’ go to City, an’ I’m gonna be a doctor and he’s gonna get all better.

“You a naive sonabitch,” he said.

I didn’t say nothing to that ‘cause I didn’t wanna get ‘im mad. I just kept lookin’ him in the face, his sad old eyes and his snarling mouth ringed wit’ stubble. I don’t wanna fight, I told him. I put down my bottle and it clinked like a church chime. I’m a man now Dad, I said, an’ I can do wha’ I want. But we oughta talk about this like men.

Then Dad got quiet again. His eyes got faraway and he moved his hand to the back o’ his belt. And then the night swooped in on me and I could feel the metal in my belly-meat and I was in the pumpkin patch with Dad, and then he was gone. The flies are pickin’ at me, itchy. The night is warm and dusty dry. Dad’s boots scuffed up all the topsoil hidin’ under the leaves, makin’ little clouds that sting my eyeball. I kept thinkin’ he was gonna close my lids, or at least put somethin’ over ‘em, but he didn’t.

The rawish copper smell of my opened-up side woulda drawn the coyotes out from their bristle-dens, but the pumpkin stink’ll cover me good. Tha’s what Dad was thinkin’ when he carried me out here. He was smart for that, but still, somethin’s wrong in his head. I dripped sticky all down his shirtfront an’ he didn’t even notice. He musta went too deep in my stomach, things were spillin’ out of me all the way up the hill and past the gate. I think he be in right mind, just not payin’ much attention to hisself. He was cryin’.

Kept sayin’, over and over, “You weren’t gon’ be a doctor. You were goin’ ‘way, you were goin’ kill your brother you weren’t gon’ be no doctor.” He wun’t talking like he was talkin’ to me, but I kept thinkin’ out my answer in my head.

He’s wrong ‘bout that. I am too goin’ City, and I’ma be a doctor too. Marty’s gon’ breathe all right forever, and the pumpkins’ll swell up nice in the fall and it’ll rain again and all be alright. The stars are purple ‘bove us tonight. The moon is yellowing back down the horizon. All the ranch is asleep by now, but I just got this feelin’ I should keep awake a bit longer. It’s a bad feelin’, like goin’ to sleep ‘thout saying your prayers. My skin hurts. Aches. The pumpkin flesh is rotting around me and the horseflies are getting bad.

But at least the heat is still here, like the sun’s just hidin’ where I can’t see. All the cold I’ve ever felt has burned off. The prairie night is hot and choking, loud like a jungle without trees. I don’t wanna go to sleep yet.

Through the walls and the windows and the writhing shadows of crowded buzzing flies, I can hear Marty whistlin’.