I would have to find a spot with some reception. I turned from the door and left the trailer. Still no bars in the upper corner of my phone. I passed the scarecrow on the hill, hurrying now. What were the scarecrow’s hands made from? Not gloves. They were tan and red, blotchy. Like skin.
That was no scarecrow.
It was a man, a dead man, with a pumpkin’s head.
“Grayson!” I screamed.
The pumpkin had been carved into a jack-o’-lantern: triangle nose, grin, two holes for eyes. And in the eyeholes, someone had pushed into the body below—they must have screwed them into the flesh to get them to stay—two seeds.
The Pumpkin King’s last two seeds, the ones he was saving for himself.
He was in there, what was left of him. I knew his face was ruined, whatever remained of it. I knew there was a bullet in his head or chest, or a knife in his belly. He was strung on a pole, his sagging body forced upright.
Grayson came stumbling over the hill. He had left the light. He had run, dragging his hurt foot. “Is he—?”
“He’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
The body was too still. It emitted stillness. It pulsed with it, like a light.
“What happened? What do we do?” Grayson said.
I stepped closer to the body.
“Wil! Don’t touch it. Goddamn it.”
Someone had taken the trouble to find the seeds, someone who knew—who must have known—what they might be worth, if spring never came back. But they had used the seeds, anyway, wasted them. To make a point? To punish him? What else had the Pumpkin King sold—the thing that made his limbs whittle away to nothing, that made his movements jerky, the thing that eased his pain? What had they taken from the trailer—or had tossed the trailer for and not been able to find?
“Wil, we gotta get out of here.”
I bent to the Pumpkin King. In the holes that had been cut in the jack-o’-lantern, I could see his body: his human body. It had never been so human. His skin shone silver and green. I saw streaks of black. He wouldn’t want me to waste anything, not when there was a chance, a chance a seed might grow, not this farmer.
“Wil!”
I pulled out the leather pouch from beneath my shirt and opened it. Gently, I picked the seeds from his eyes. We had all the seeds now. I added the red millet from my pocket. I wiped my hands of blood and drew the drawstrings closed.