Ollie’s Pumpkin Goes Up

Now, before we start, I want you to know one thing about this pumpkin, and I want you to know it right away. If you spend the whole story waiting for me to explain it, you will not enjoy yourself.

The pumpkin floated.

That’s it. That’s the whole fact. It was hollow, and whatever was inside it was lighter than air. I am not going to tell you why, because nobody in Nether Tuck ever found out either, and they had it hanging over their heads for years.

Ollie was nine, and he had grown exactly one pumpkin. Other boys grew six and lost interest in four. Ollie grew one and talked to it every morning on his way to school and every afternoon on his way back, and told it about his day, and it never once interrupted him, which is more than you can say for most friends. He called it Big Sam. By September, Big Sam was the size of a wheelbarrow and the color of a struck match, and he did not sit on the ground like a sensible pumpkin. He bobbed. He hung at the end of his vine about a foot above the dirt, swinging a little when the wind came through the beans.

And when the geese went over, honking their way south, Big Sam turned. Slowly. All the way around on his vine, keeping his stem pointed at them until they were gone over the wood. Like a dog watching a car go by.

Ollie thought this was the finest thing he had ever seen, and he was right.

Here is what Ollie wished for, and you will not have to wait for it. He wanted to win the hat.

Every autumn on the green at Nether Tuck there was the Harvest Fair, and at the Harvest Fair there was a prize for the Heaviest Pumpkin, and the prize was a hat. Not a cup, not a ribbon, not money. A hat. A tall green one with a feather in it. Ollie’s grandpa had won that hat twice, long ago. He had worn it to church both times. There was a photograph of him in it on the shelf at home, looking pleased with himself in a way that Ollie very much wanted to look one day.

Ollie had thought about the floating. He had decided that Big Sam was the biggest pumpkin anybody in Nether Tuck had ever grown. Big is heavy, he reasoned, and a proper iron scale would know it even if the air didn’t.

He had even practiced his speech. He said it into a bucket in the shed, because a bucket makes your voice sound important. Thank you. I would like to thank the soil, and the rain, and my grandpa, who showed me how deep to dig. He had practiced it eleven times. He was ready.

The morning of the Fair came with a frost that crunched, and wood smoke going up straight from every chimney in Nether Tuck. Ollie led Big Sam to the Fair on a string, like a balloon.

The first try went wrong at the scale.

The scale was a great iron thing with a basket on it, and old Mr. Weaver in charge of it, and a cat called Nutmeg asleep in the basket, as she was every year, because it was the warmest spot on the green. Ollie put Big Sam in the basket. Mr. Weaver reached for the weights.

The basket went up.

It went up with Big Sam in it, and it went up with Nutmeg in it, and it took the arm of the scale with it. Nutmeg woke a good deal higher than she went to sleep, with the expression of a cat who has been insulted on purpose. Mr. Weaver hooked the basket down with a rake, and Nutmeg was out of it before it touched the grass. She went home and did not come back all day.

“That,” said Mr. Weaver, “is the lightest heavy pumpkin I ever saw.”

The second try went wrong worse.

Ollie’s idea was turnips. There were plenty of turnips at the Fair, there always are, and Ollie borrowed a sack of them and cut a small door in Big Sam’s side and posted turnips in one by one. It took thirty-one. Big Sam sat on the grass like a pumpkin ought to, and Ollie was so pleased he said the first line of his speech out loud by accident.

Then Mr. Weaver tipped him toward the basket, and the little door swung open, and six turnips rolled out at once, and that was that.

Big Sam went up off the green, quite calmly, the way a hot air balloon leaves a field. He drifted over the bunting. He drifted over the sausage stall. And as he tipped he went on unloading, and the turnips came down one after another on the roof of the bakery: bonk, bonk, bonkbonkbonk. Mrs. Pocket came out into the street with flour on her arms, looked up, and said, “Turnips!” which was accurate, and all she could manage.

She has been telling people about it ever since. She tells it at every Fair. There is still one turnip up on the bakery roof, and she could get it down with a ladder, and she has decided not to. It is, she says, the most interesting thing on her building.

The third try was a fishing rod.

It was Ollie’s dad who thought of it, and Ollie who did it. He stood on the churchyard wall with a fishing rod and a great deal of patience. Half the village stood below giving advice, all of it different. He hooked the stem on the fourth cast. He reeled Big Sam down out of the sky hand over hand. When the pumpkin came in over the wall everybody cheered, and Big Sam turned slowly on his string, because the geese were going over again.

And by then, you see, the judging was finished. Not because it was over. Because nobody had judged anything since the cat went up.

So the Mayor climbed onto a crate. The Mayor of Nether Tuck was a man who loved inventing rules more than he loved his dinner, and considered it the main part of the job.

“New category,” he said. “Highest Pumpkin.”

Somebody said there had never been a Highest Pumpkin.

“There is now,” said the Mayor.

Somebody said there was only one entry.

“A shame,” said the Mayor, “but not a disqualification.”

And somebody said, as somebody always does, that surely for a brand new prize there ought to be a brand new sort of prize, something other than a hat.

The Mayor looked at that person the way you look at a person who has suggested the sun come up in the west.

“It has always been a hat,” he said.

So Ollie got a hat. It was the tall green one with the feather, and it was four sizes too big. It came down over his ears and sat on his eyebrows, and he had to tip his head back to see out from under it.

Grandpa was there at the edge of the green, on a chair, with a blanket over his knees. He got up out of it when the hat came down over Ollie’s ears. He came across the grass and tipped the brim back off the boy’s eyebrows so he could see out, and he said, “It was too big for me the first time, too.”

Then Ollie stood on the crate and said his speech into the crowd. He used most of it, including the part about the soil and the rain, and all of the part about his grandpa, who showed him how deep to dig.

Then the village did the kind thing, and it was the Mayor’s last rule of the day. They tied Big Sam by a long rope to the iron ring on the church tower, and they put a candle inside him through the little turnip door, and they let him up. And every evening after that Ollie hauled him down by the rope, put in a fresh candle, and let him up again. It was the best job in the village and he never once let anybody else do it.

All that autumn, when the dark came early, there was a low orange moon over Nether Tuck, swinging gently, turning to watch the geese.

Nutmeg forgave everybody by December. She slept all that winter on the warm stone below the tower, in the orange light.

The next spring every gardener in the village planted a seed from him. By autumn there was a floating pumpkin over every garden gate, each one with a candle in it, each one bobbing on its string.

And that is how Nether Tuck got its lamps.

The end.