Full and ripe and round. Bulbous orange gourds in tangles of thick green vine and rustling leaves. A bumper crop again this year.
"Thank you, Melvin," Annie said, leaning on the split-rail fence that surrounded the pumpkin patch.
The irate caw of a crow was her only answer. She saw the bird take off, flapping-black, into the dissipating morning fog from the top of the plywood sign.
"Auntie Annie's Farm," it read. "Corn Maze, Pumpkin Patch, Hay Rides." Below that, the dates and hours of operation. "October 1-31, Ten A.M. to Five P.M." The paint was weather-faded, but still legible enough that she didn't think she had to re-do it this year.
Steve, her handyman, said that she should get herself a website and put it on there, too. He might have looked like an extra from the cast of Hee-Haw, all rawboned with sunbleached blond hair and a genial farmboy's face, but he was addicted to computers, video games, and all sorts of modern gadgets that didn't interest Annie at all.
The sign stood beside the long gravel driveway that led to the farmhouse, and was angled to be visible from the main road. Beyond it was her barn, old and picturesquely ramshackle. The big doors were propped open, and more signs advertised snacks, drinks, the direction to the Port-a-Potties, and prices.
In a few hours, that barn would be full of people. Town people, who would park their cars and SUVs out in the muddy west field. Bundled against the brisk wind, red-faced, chapped-lipped, they would make the most of their "day in the country." Picking their own pumpkins. Feeding seed corn from the coin-op dispenser to Sadie the goat. Buying homemade cookies and jars of blackberry preserves.
The money she'd bring in this month alone would allow Annie to pay Steve's wages, plus those of the trio of local kids she hired for seasonal labor. With enough left over to keep her nicely the rest of the year.
"And all because of you, Melvin," she said to the pumpkin patch.
To think, initially, she hadn't wanted to leave the city and move out here to the middle of nowhere. Melvin had found the farm, pressured her into it. That had been ten years ago, and it was amazing how the time flew. He hadn't wanted to actually be a farmer, no, of course not. Not Melvin. He styled himself a "rustic poet," when he wasn't composing greeting-card verse for a Hallmark rival, and felt he needed to get back to nature.
"You sure did that, didn't you, Melvin?" Annie chuckled, but there was an unpleasant edge to it. "Back to nature, all right."
He'd had it coming. She had warned him time and again that he better not drink around her, because when he drank – he said all poets had to drink, it was part of the image – he got mean. When he got mean, he hit.
So, seven years ago this Halloween, she'd bashed his head in with a shovel and buried him in the pumpkin patch.
She told everyone that he'd moved to New York to starve in a garret while he tried a new approach to his poetry. Anybody who'd had even a passing acquaintance with Melvin hadn't doubted that story for a second.
And ever since, boy howdy, the pumpkins had been tremendous. Best she'd ever seen. All of them plump and perfectly shaped. True, they'd tasted a little funny at first and she quit using them for pies. But they were just right for jack-o-lantern carving. It had given her the idea to not just sell them to the produce stands and grocery stores, but to turn the farm into a Halloween destination. She'd started with the patch, then added the maze, and business had boomed from there.
Annie herself had never felt happier. She'd been a dumpy, miserable woman when Melvin brought her out here. Now, after all those years of hard digging and working in the fields, living a simple and healthy life, she was in better shape than ever before.
Her figure would never grace the cover of those magazines, because she had strong arms, broad shoulders, and wide hips. But once she'd slimmed away her excess pounds, she'd discovered a fine pair of tits, good legs, and a grade-A behind. In the right pair of jeans, with one button too many left undone on a snug flannel shirt and her wheat-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, she could turn heads.
Even Steve, the handyman, had made noises once or twice that indicated he wouldn't mind working nights, as it were. Annie hadn't yet taken him up on those hints. Flattering though it was, she was still ten years older than him. And people did talk. Word would get around. She didn't care for the idea of hearing whispers whenever she went into town to do her marketing, or having people cast knowing looks her way.
The sun burst through the fog, turning the pumpkins to globes of brilliant orange flame. Annie surveyed them, smiling. Not many left. Tonight was Halloween, and the past week had been so busy that she'd fallen into bed each night plain bone weary.
Her smile faltered as she spotted one particular pumpkin.
Just as there was a runt in every litter of pups or piglets, each crop contained a few gourds that weren't up to standard. They'd be lumpy or misshapen, or they wouldn't rest flat on their bottoms, or they'd have blotches and blemishes. Come early November, she always had a few to plow back under.
This one, though, was downright hideous. It lurked under a nasty snakelike nestle of vines as if hiding, as if ashamed. Instead of being a rich shade of orange, it was mottled rust and green, gnarled with mustard-colored growths like tumors.
Nobody was going to buy that ugly fucking thing, she was sure. As a jack-o-lantern, it'd be too scary even for Halloween. Unless it was on a psycho's porch, but as far as Annie knew, none of her neighbors or even the people from town were bona fide psychos.
She heard an engine and turned, shading her eyes against the morning glare. Now that the fog was burning off, it was shaping up into a dazzling autumn day, the sky pure blue, the sun warm but the wind carrying a hint of chill.
Steve's truck rattled and jounced down the gravel road. He must have seen Annie, because he honked and waved. Moments later, the truck sputtered to a stop by the side of the barn. Steve had stopped on his way to pick up Cissy Potts and the Beaker twins, all of them in costume on account of it was Halloween.
Cissy was dressed as a convict, in black and white stripes with a plastic ball and chain hooked to her ankle. Randy Beaker was a pirate, with a clip-on gold hoop swinging from his earlobe and a red scarf tied over his head. Ricky Beaker had on a set of hospital scrubs and wore a stethoscope slung around his neck. Steve was Elvis, with a blue-black pompadour wig and white jumpsuit.
"Time to get to work, Melvin," Annie said, dusting her hands on the seat of her jeans. She spared a final glance at the ugly pumpkin. Damn thing turned her stomach
"Aww, Annie!" Steve called. "Not dressing up?"
"I am, I am," she said. "But they're only voting on you four, and Butch and Sadie."
All day long, visitors to the farm would have a chance to cast their votes, and at the end of the day whoever had the most votes would get a special bonus prize – a ten dollar gift certificate to Suzy Q's diner.
While the others went about their various tasks, Annie headed into the house and got into her own costume. Annie the Sexy Scarecrow. Tufts of straw stuck out of her sleeves and the cuffs and bib of her overalls. She smudged charcoal on her nose and brick-red rouge on her cheeks, tucked her hair up under a floppy hat stuffed with more straw, and called it good.
By then, the early-bird cars were already creeping up the drive and negotiating the west field. Annie hurried to dress up the animals. Sadie the goat got a polka-dot clown suit and rainbow-haired frizzy wig. Butch, Annie's old hound dog, submitted to wearing a cowboy hat and bandanna.
She'd advertised in the local paper, too, that anyone who showed up wearing a costume of their own would get a dollar off the pumpkin of their choice. Most of the ones who did were kids, but a few grownups got into the spirit, too. There were bumblebees and superheroes, ghosts and dinosaurs, hoboes and fairy princesses.
