by Betty Tesh

Created on: November 11, 2008

Across the Pumpkin Patch

Ella Mae stepped out on her back porch and looked across the pumpkin patch to where Tansy's little tenant shack stood gray and pitiful against the rich yellow of the turning poplars and the fiery red of the maples. In the crisp October air, no plume of smoke wafted from the caty-wonkers chimney.

There were still traces of frost in the shadows of the orange pumpkins. She could see the traces of Leon's boots, marking his run across the sugar-spangled yard to catch the school bus this morning.

Wonder why she's not up and stirring.

Not that Ella Mae cared what their tenant did. She of the orange-dyed hair, the cigarette wrinkles around her mouth, the gray-green eyes outlined all around with black eyeliner. She was white trash, that's what she was. That worthless Lanny Watkins had brought her to live with him in the tenant shack, back when he was their odd-jobs man; and when he died (run over by a train, stupid man, falling asleep on the tracks on his way home from a drunken night out at the U-Betcha Canteen), her Rayvon, good Christian man that he was, told Tansy she could live there in the shack, rent free, until they hired another odd-jobs fellow.

Not that they saw her often because she kept pretty much to herself. Which was a relief to Ella, who didn't especially care for that kind of woman living alone so close to their own well-kept, three-bedroom brick home. Even as good a man as Rayvon was, people were likely to talk about anybody.

Still, this made the second cold morning with no sign of fire, and the third day Ella hadn't seen Tansy tramping around the dirt yard, flinging corn to those shamefully scrawny four chickens of hers.

That day, realizing that Tansy kept eyeing the pumpkin patch, Ella had shouted out, "I got them pumpkins counted, girl! They better not one show up missing!"

No skin off my nose, what goes on in that shack, she thought. She's probably took up with another no-account.
Then she began fretting about how Tansy'd probably left the place. She imagined how it would be if the woman had cleared out in the middle of the night, not so much as stopping by to say "Thanks...I'll be going now." She imagined garbage scattered all around. Dirty dishes in the wash pan. If she'd even left any dishes. A trail of wood chips from the little stack of split logs by the back door all the way to the fireplace, which was more than likely full of ashes.

Finally, she could stand it no more. Throwing on her old black sweater, she stormed out of

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