Hands shaking, she picked up the hacksaw from where she’d hidden it. “Don’t be afraid, Laura. It’ll be kind of like a baby getting its umbilical cord cut so it can go out into the world. You’re going to get a ride in the truck to the fairgrounds so everyone can see you. Everyone will admire you, and say what a beautiful pumpkin you are. And best of all, you’ll win the money that will buy the piano that will make Mom want to stay. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
Terpsichore hadn’t thought this step out well. Even with her belly snugged up against Laura’s side, the stem was an arm’s length away, and at shoulder height, she couldn’t get full strength on the blade. The first timid pass with the end of the saw barely dented the surface of the prickly stem.
She lowered the saw in defeat.
“Let me,” Pop said.
Terpsichore turned, and surrendered the hacksaw to her father, who had followed her out to the field. “Thanks,” she said.
With her father’s height and longer, stronger arms, he severed the stem in a few decisive passes with the saw. He pulled the loose vine away from the pumpkin’s side.
Terpsichore felt the comforting weight of her father’s hand on her shoulder. “You did a mighty fine job with this pumpkin,” he said. “I’m proud of you, Terpsichore.”
“Do you think she’ll win?” Terpsichore asked. She looked up at his face to see if he was telling her what he believed or what she wanted to hear.
“I can’t imagine anyone’s growing anything bigger,” he said. He looked like he meant it. “Mr. Crawford has a pickup and we can get a couple guys to help load her in.” He lifted his hand from Terpsichore’s shoulder to point to the edge of the vegetable garden. “Not sure how I’m going to get the truck here without running over some of the vegetable patch, though. We could run it through the chard or the spinach or the kale . . .”
Terpsichore’s mouth convulsed at the thought of kale. “I vote for kale,” she said.
Pop laughed. “Me too.”
Both turned at the sound of Mr. Crawford’s truck. And just behind Mr. Crawford was Mendel with a tractor with a forklift. Terpsichore waved. “Hooray!”
“The whole crew’s here,” Pop said. “I think we’re ready.”
Mendel pulled out an armload of supplies from the floor of the forklift. The tractor driver and Mr. Crawford slid a heavy beam out of the back of the pickup, carried it up next to Laura, and went back for another.
Mendel set down a heap of four-inch webbing, block and tackle, and a heavy iron hook. “I’ve worked it all out with Mr. Crawford,” he said. “We’ll lift the pumpkin with a net of webbing and set her down in the back of the pickup. It’s sort of like the way they hoisted livestock on and off the St. Mihiel.”
Terpsichore watched her father and Mr. Crawford erect a tripod over Laura, wrap her in a harness of heavy webbing, and hook the top of the webbing to the iron hook at the end of a length of chain.
Terpsichore wrung her hands as, with a rattle and a clank, Laura began to rise.
She gasped in relief when gently, as gently as putting a baby in its crib, the hoist swung over the back of the pickup and Laura was laid on its nest of straw and quilts.
Terpsichore clambered up on the back to ride with Laura to the fairgrounds.
CHAPTER 46
The Great Weigh-In
TERPSICHORE AND GLORIA STOOD IN THE BACK OF THE pickup as it approached the weighing station by the train depot. Mr. Crawford couldn’t get through the mass of people to get the pickup in line, so he pulled over at the edge of the crowd. Wheelbarrows were lined up with Laura’s competition. Pumpkins weren’t the only things that grew big in Alaska.
They listened to all the weigh-in results. “Seventy-five pounds!” Gloria said. “That rutabaga weighs almost as much as I do!”
“That may be big for a rutabaga, but it’s no match for a giant pumpkin,” Terpsichore said.
“You said it! But vegetables sure grow big in Alaska! That zucchini is as big as your brother! And it’s taking two people to lift that cantaloupe!”
Gloria’s voice dropped to a whisper as she grabbed Terpsichore’s arm and pointed to an approaching pickup truck. “Uh-oh! That’s the man I was talking about.”
Terpsichore watched as two men crawled out of the truck and lifted the cabbage out of the back. It had a leaf-spread wider than a tall man’s arm span.
Terpsichore held her breath as the cabbage was weighed. “Only forty-five pounds,” she said. “It is wide, but only the center weighs anything. The rest is just leaves stretched out to look big.” She could breathe again.
The one other pumpkin was big, but no match for Laura. It was only ninety-eight pounds.
The judges were almost ready to call an end to the weigh-in when Terpsichore yelled out from the back of the pickup. “Hey, I’ve got a pumpkin too, but I need to clear a path to the scale because it’s too heavy to lift.”
Pop and Mendel held back the crowd as Mr. Crawford edged the pickup toward the loading dock. Terpsichore fought back the urge to cover her eyes as Pop and Mendel and one of the judges positioned the padded forklift under the edge of Laura to move her from the back of the pickup to the scale on the loading platform.
“Hello, old-timer. Is this your pumpkin?” a judge asked.
“I’m just the delivery boy,” Mr. Crawford said. “Here’s the grower.”
“You? And your name, young lady?” the judge asked.
Terpsichore climbed up to the loading platform with Laura. “Miss Terpsichore Johnson,” she said. “Lot number seventy-seven.”
“Terp what?”
“Terp-sick-oh-ree,” she said, speaking directly into the judge’s microphone. “And my pumpkin’s name is Laura.”
The crowd laughed, then went silent as everyone watched the red arrow on the scale zip past fifty pounds, eighty pounds, one hundred pounds, two hundred pounds, and came to a quavering rest at two hundred and ninety-three pounds.
Terpsichore flushed as admiring oohs and aahs echoed through the crowd. Laura had surely won.
The judges conferred for a moment and one of them shouted out, “We have a winner! A two-hundred-ninety-three-pound pumpkin!”
The man with the cabbage stormed up to the platform. “Just a minute here! This contest was for the biggest vegetable grown in Palmer, and pumpkin is not a vegetable, it’s a fruit. And why are we bothering with a weigh-in anyway? Big means measuring tape big, not how much something weighs.”
Terpsichore scrambled off the loading platform to confront Mr. Cabbage Man. She barely reached the snaps on his overall straps, but her voice was just as loud. “If it’s not animal or mineral, it’s vegetable! And my pumpkin weighs more than your cabbage. It’s bigger!” She put her hands on her hips in a so-there attitude.
Mr. Cabbage Man leaned over so he was eye to eye with Terpsichore. “The rules said the prize goes to the biggest.” He stood and stretched his arms out like an eagle in flight. “My cabbage’s leaf spread is pert-near six feet.”
“But my pumpkin weighs over two hundred pounds.”
Mr. Cabbage Man didn’t back down. “Rules say ve-ge-ta-ble and rules say biggest, not heaviest,” he said. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the judges were listening to his defense of his cabbage.
Terpsichore looked toward her cheering section. Mom, Matthew, and the twins were all at the apple pie booth that was earning money for new textbooks for the school, so it was just Pop, Mr. Crawford, Gloria, and Mendel. Pop raised his eyebrows and pointed to his chest, silently asking her if she wanted him to take over her defense, but Terpsichore shook her head. This was her pumpkin and her fight. Mendel was riffling through the rule book, probably trying to find another argument for her.
Mr. Cabbage Man trotted out his final argument. “Besides,” he said, pointing to his cheering section, which consisted of eight stairstep children who a
ll had his pointed nose and lank, sawdust-colored hair, “my wife died of pneumonia last winter and I have eight children to feed. What would you do with the money, buy a Shirley Temple doll?”
Terpsichore shook her head, but she was biting her lips shut against bawling and could not answer.
At first the crowd had been sympathetic toward Terpsichore, harassed and out-talked by a grown-up. But when the crowd turned toward the man’s children, they chorused “Awww,” and Terpsichore knew there was no point in pursuing her fight.
The judges huddled over the rule book.
Then the head judge stepped toward the microphone. “After serious deliberation and careful reading of the rules, we have decided the prize goes to the biggest—not heaviest—true vegetable, the cabbage, with a circumference of two hundred and twenty-six inches!”
Mr. Cabbage Man’s supporters applauded. But many in the audience muttered in disapproval. The judge wiped his brow and held up his hand. “But we decided that this young lady’s pumpkin deserves recognition too, so she will be awarded a blue ribbon for best in category and a five-dollar prize.” He smiled anxiously, hoping this acknowledgment would placate everyone. It did not. Several clusters of folks trickled away, muttering their disagreement. “The little girl should have won . . . just a technicality.”
Terpsichore forced a smile, held her head high, and strode to the podium to collect her ribbon and five dollars.
CHAPTER 47
The Interview
POP HUGGED TERPSICHORE. “A BLUE RIBBON FOR BEST IN category! That’s great, Terpsichore.”
Mendel and Gloria also tried to cheer her up, but Terpsichore could not be cheered, not after working so hard and losing. “But only five dollars. I needed twenty-five.” Her grandmother would arrive later today, so it was beginning to look like the Johnsons would be back in Madison, Wisconsin, within a week unless Terpsichore could find a way to make up for the other twenty dollars she did not win.
Only a few yards away, a journalist from the Anchorage Daily Times was interviewing Mr. Cabbage Man and his eight children. While the man posed with his arms outstretched behind his cabbage, showing just how big it was, the photographer took his picture. Fame was only for the winners, not the runners-up.
But maybe not. Now the reporter headed toward Terpsichore.
“Terpsichore, maybe he’ll take your picture too!” Gloria finger-combed her hair and made sure her collar was at its best rakish, propped-up angle.
Mendel positioned himself next to the pumpkin and spread one arm proprietarily across the top.
The reporter held out his hand to Pop. “I’m Scoop Swanson, Anchorage Daily Times.”
“I’m Mr. Johnson, the proud father of this champion pumpkin grower, Terpsichore Johnson.”
“That’s some moniker, little lady. And it looks as if you grow pumpkins even bigger than your name.” He took out his notebook. “Terpsich . . . something . . . that was one of those Greek goddesses, wasn’t it?”
“Terpsichore was the Muse of Dance,” she told him. “That’s T-e-r-p-s-i-c-h-o-r-e.”
“You grew this pumpkin all by yourself?” The reporter flipped his notebook to another page and took his pencil from behind his ear.
“Pretty much,” Terpsichore said. “I started the seeds, made my own compost from the chicken coop droppings, and watered nearly every day.”
“But I helped battle the squash bugs,” Mendel said.
“And this champion pumpkin grower also has a book of her own Alaska recipes for sale tomorrow when we get the pumpkin back to the booth!” Gloria said.
“Whoa,” the reporter said. “Let’s start with the pumpkin grower herself. Mind if I take some pictures?” He looked to Pop for approval. Pop nodded yes and stepped out of the range of the camera.
“You don’t mind, either, do you, Laura?” Terpsichore reached out to rub her stem end.
“Laura?”
“I named her after Laura in Little House on the Prairie. The man she grew up to marry, Almanzo Wilder in Farmer Boy, grew a prize-winning pumpkin.”
“Any secrets to growing the prize-winning pumpkin?”
“Well, I started the seedlings indoors, and when it was safely past frost I transplanted them outdoors. I thinned the seedlings to the strongest and pruned each vine to the biggest pumpkin so all the energy could go to producing a giant. I lost Almanzo, that was my other giant, when he soaked up so much water he split, but I saved Laura from squash bugs . . .”
“With my help,” said Mendel.
“Yes. With Mendel’s help,” Terpsichore agreed, “and I carried a hundred gallons of water a week from the well and fed her compost and talked to her every day . . .”
“Talking, huh? What do you say to a pumpkin?” the reporter asked.
“Sometimes I just complimented them on how big and healthy they looked, or read the chapter in Farmer Boy when Almanzo’s pumpkin won the blue ribbon, to inspire them, you know? And I explained what I was doing when I started feeding them buttermilk . . .”
“Now, just a minute.” The reporter pulled his glasses down on his nose and looked skeptically at Terpsichore. “How do you feed a pumpkin buttermilk?”
She leaned way over Laura to point out a tiny slit in the stem. “See? That’s where I poked the string that wicked the buttermilk from a pie pan to the stem and on into Laura. And it worked. Just like it did for Almanzo.”
The reporter shook his head as he wrote down what Terpsichore said. “Buttermilk feeding and talking . . .” He looked up again to ask, “What were you planning to do with the money? If you’re anything like my little sister, you were saving for new school clothes, right?”
Terpsichore huffed indignantly. “It wasn’t for anything for me. It’s something for my mother, so she’ll want to stay in Alaska. But it’s a secret.”
“Won’t you tell me?”
“A secret is a secret. Can’t you just print what I said: that it’s something for my mother so she won’t vote for us to move back to Wisconsin.”
“So you like it here, huh?”
“Yes! And the rest of the family all wants to stay. Pop’s worked hard to make us a home here and my sisters have a horse named Smoky, and my cat Tigger and her kittens like it in Alaska, and I can have a big garden, and my friends are here and . . .”
“Readers will want to know: what do you plan to do now with . . . Laura?”
“I hope she’ll attract customers to our booth. I’ll be selling my Alaska cookbook there tomorrow, with recipes for birch bark syrup, lots of pumpkin and berry and salmon recipes, of course, and even jellied moose nose.”
“Jellied moose nose? I’ve heard of it, but does anyone really make it?”
Terpsichore grinned. “I haven’t tried it either, but according to an old-timer friend from the valley, it’s quite a delicacy.”
The reporter hunched over his notebook, making notes before he looked up again. “How much are you selling your recipe books for?”
“Fifty cents,” she said.
Gloria and Mendel, who had impatiently remained quiet for the last couple of minutes, both piped in:
“With covers by Gloria!”
“And elegant calligraphy by Mendel Peterson!”
“Do you want your friend to stay in Alaska?” The reporter turned to them, ready to record quotes.
“Absolutely-tootly,” Gloria said.
“Without question,” Mendel said.
The journalist asked, “How many copies of your recipe book did you make?”
“A hundred,” Terpsichore said. She realized as she said it that now that she hadn’t won the twenty-five dollars, that wouldn’t be enough. She’d need to sell another forty copies to have enough to buy the piano, and another twenty to pay back the school for supplies.
As if reading her mind, the reporter said, “I think you’d better m
ake another hundred. After one of these pictures of you and Laura appears in tonight’s paper, and I write about how you need that money for a surprise for your mother so she’ll want to stay in Alaska, I suspect you’ll get a lot of business tomorrow.”
The boards beneath their feet on the loading dock beside the railroad station began to vibrate, and a shrill whistle broke into Terpsichore’s calculations of how much paper she’d need to print a hundred more copies of her recipe book.
Before Gloria and Mendel could leave to find their families, Terpsichore pulled them aside. “Did you hear what the reporter said about the newspaper article helping us sell lots more recipe books? We need more copies by tomorrow, and with Grandmother coming I won’t be able to get away!”
“If I can get the key from one of the teachers, I can run more copies in the school office,” Mendel said.
“And I can put the pages in order and staple them,” Gloria said.
Terpsichore squeezed their hands. “I knew I could count on you!”
CHAPTER 48
Grandmother
WITH A SHRIEK, BRAKES SLOWED THE TRAIN TO A STOP just in front of the Johnsons. The engines hissed and enveloped them in steam.
As soon as the train came to a complete stop, the conductor pulled down the steps at the door of the passenger car and spread his arms to cordon off clear passage for those getting off. Terpsichore shuffled back a few steps.
Mother held up Matthew so he could see over the grown-ups’ shoulders. “Grandma’s coming,” she said. “Wave to Grandma.”
Matthew waved both hands at everyone getting off. Just when Terpsichore was beginning to think Grandmother had missed the train, a porter descended the steps lugging two monogrammed leather suitcases. He set those down with a thump. Then, both he and the conductor reached out a hand to assist the tall woman in an ermine coat down the two steps onto the platform.
Mother thrust Matthew into Pop’s arms so she could wave with both hands. “Mother, Mother, we’re here!”
Sweet Home Alaska Page 19
