Trashscarf And The Pumpkin Man
(dried grass, baling twine, cat fur, leaves, straw, dead vine)
A faraway land. A crisp fall day. A landscape, stretching to the horizons, of rolling hills, rocky peaks, roving rivers and forests sort of clustered around like gossips at a tea party but not really doing much except a little freelance rustling. And there, winding with a way at once natural and contrived, the faint and sometimes fading line of persistent passage-- a road. Not just a road, in fact... but a Way. And walking along it, as they do, is a Waywalker.
Trashscarf, for so it is, is rather noncommittal of appearance; human for all intents and purposes, not very young, but not really old either, average of height, and of a build that would indicate he's had many more miles than meals under his belt. Pleasant enough, with wide innocent eyes and an easy smile, a kindly if dramatic voice and a mass of curly hair. The only thing particularly distinctive was the eponymous knitwoven webnet knotted macramangle of fibers and small bits of things that was wrapped a couple of times around the lean shoulders and spilled gently down into the dust behind, while the working end was a running commentary even now being spun and curled and tugged into order, of baling twine and dry grasses and here and there a newly-turned leaf.
Trashscarf the Waywalker smiled a cat-ate-the-canary grin, and flicked a wayward lock of hair from his eyes. "Oh, but that's just the thing," he said to the air, and apparently not to anyone in particular, "The way I do it is, I sorta... let the road do it for me." And he patted his pack-- a jumble of odds and ends, blankets and cookpots, a length of rope, a dried-up hardboiled rasher of bacon wrapped in a bit of paper, a book, a stuffed bear, a flask of water, -- and then waved a hand vaguely at the dusty trail ahead. "See, I just, you know, walk along, and let the road do the deciding. I mean, I could get there by nightfall if I really wanted to, but you know how it is... really wanting something is rather a lot of effort, and I'd rather walk five, ten, even twenty miles out of my way, than have to work hard getting there faster. Especially," he added with a wink to his unseen audience, "since 'there' is all subjective. Really it's almost mythical; 'there' becomes 'here' in the blink of an eye. I try not to have a destination firmly in mind-- it forestalls disappointment."
Perhaps so, but he'd be lying if he didn't have certain hopes for that point that lay somewhere in space and time ahead of him, when the road ahead met with night's flowing edge-- something along the lines of a comfortable place to sleep would be most welcome, and while a reasonably dry patch of landscape could and would and had served many a time, he couldn't help thinking of warm fires, hot meals, cold drinks and good conversation. Mind you, he seemed to be doing fine on the conversation part all by himself.
"Well, someone has to," he snorted, squinting at the horizon and wondering how much daylight was left. "The scenery can't just go on forever, can it?"
His tone was dubious because he'd been walking more years than he could count at this point, and so the landscape did seem to be endlessly generating before him. Still, there were certainly stops along the way. And one of these seemed to be in luck, for its faint cozy light flickered in the shadow of a mountain in the lengthening dusk, not far away, and that meant it was fortunate enough that Trashscarf would bestow his patronage upon it, or at least, hopefully, in the outbuildings thereof, for he realized it had been a long time since he'd heard any clink of coin from his own pockets.
"What do you mean, you haven't heard any clink?" he cried in dismay, and, for a moment, his face fell, and he began rifling through his pockets, but before he could make a proper search a little shape came loping up, a stray cat come back from its wanderings to rub about his ankles. He bent to scratch its ears and set it purring happily, but the cat's return was only a distraction from the dire state of his finances. "This can't be happening," he muttered between clenched teeth, "I'm a Waywalker, I have a reputation to uphold!"
And then a thought struck him. "My reputation," he said aloud, "what if it's all a lie?" He paused in the middle of a flicking motion with a bit of twine, and a cold finger of doubt jabbed at him. "Surely," he said, "a Waywalker cannot be so easily deceived, cannot be led into such a simple and yet cunning trick!" He scooped up the cat and held it up to his face, gently but firmly, glaring at it, nose to nose. "You," he told it sternly. "Are you a thief? What did you do with my coins?!" The cat glared back, and they had a brief staring contest, which the cat won. He set it down, and it sat patiently, licking its paw, and purring, and after a while Trashscarf had to admit that nothing was happening.
"Oh, no," he said, "I am deceived. A rank amateur! I am the victim of a grand scheme of illusion." And he shuddered, "For how long, I wonder. Years. Decades. Centuries. Have I been walking in circles, or am I on some sort of strange adventure? Oh, the things I could have seen, the things I could have done..." his eyes went wide, and he gaped at the creature, who gave no response. He dropped to a hunker in front of the cat, like a top hat collapsing. "I want answers!"
The cat looked at him in a meaningful way. Before he'd become a Waywalker, Trashscarf had been a sort of urban druid, and as such, he could speak to urban creatures, such as people and Felis catus. He could speak all he liked, and he liked a lot-- but there was nothing that required anyone to answer. He straightened back up to glower on the cat from on high. "Well, if you're going to be like that, you could at least find me a meal or something then."
The cat blinked slowly, and then turned away and trotted towards the little village, and Trashscarf followed the white tip of its tail in the faint lavender lambence of the dusk.
The inn was busy, but the cat led him around to the back door, where it was clearly a regular customer. The cook there, putting out scraps, barely batted an eye at the ragged wanderer keeping company with the sleek feline. A bowl of scraps deemed unworthy by the cat, consisting mainly of bread-ends and spurned vegetables, was an ample meal and far better than Trashscarf had enjoyed in some time, but it did make him thirsty, so after bidding a farewell tickle to the chin of the cat, he ambled around to the front door to see if he could insinuate himself long enough to bayonet a few wounded drinks before being noticed and heaved out.
He ambled in through the front door, and glanced around as he took in a few loops of his scarf so it wouldn't drag on the floor and get stepped on.
The inn was busy indeed, with an eclectic crowd of both travelers and locals, and the room was filled with the cheerful voices of what seemed to be an exuberant game of cards in full swing. The game was interrupted by the appearance at the door of the visitor, who, having propped his pack against the wall, had taken to meticulously wiping his feet on the doormat before he even entered the room, but this apparently was too much for the occupants of the room who were in the midst of a spirited round of betting, and he was greeted with a chorus of vigorous heckling.
"Hey, it's the Waywalker! The real deal! Well, maybe not, but still!"
"Hello, everyone!" he said cheerfully, waving to the room at large, while trying to recognize faces in the dim light. He did indeed see a number of people he'd met along the road in the last few days, and had made campfire companions of.
"Well, what brings you down this way?" said a burly man in a leather vest over a white shirt, bearing the faded image of a bird of prey upon his chest.
"Well, I suppose it's as good as any other place," Trashscarf said, as the cat hopped onto the table and sat primly by his elbow, "but I can't say I'm not happy to see you folks!"
"Well, we're here," said the burly man. "But that's because we like it here. So, what do you say? I'm first, and I've bet five coppers to your one, so lay it on me."
"Ah, well," Trashscarf said, and he launched into it.
He grabbed a fold of his scarf more or less at random, and perked up at once upon his fingers brushing the messy knots studded with seashells. "Ah! This is a good one-- So, if you take the Red Road past the Grey Hills, you'll eventually get to the coast, and there's a lovely stretch of beach there, and that's where I met this mermaid--" He had a good voice, and an expressive face, and he did funny voices for the other characters, and as he did so he could sense the skepticism in the room slowly giving way to something else.
You could hear a pin drop as he spun his tale, and as he laid out his wares, a tankard for a song, a story for a drink, a joke for a free tankard for a story, a song for a joke, a tale for a song, a song for a tale-- the room was suddenly filled with chatter as he held forth.
"I have a story about a dragon," someone said shyly.
"A joke about a horse," said another.
"I have a song about a girl."
"A song about a boy."
"A song about a girl, I think."
"Wait, I want to hear the one about the dragon!" said someone, loudly.
Trashscarf blinked and pointed at them with both hands with arms crossed-- "Then you'll need to ask her, it's her story," and he gave an encouraging nod to the shy woman, who spoke up, her voice at first wavering and unsure like a seedling first breaking the crust, but then as the rest of the group fell into respectful listening silence along with Trashscarf, her story grew taller and thicker and stronger, pale turning into the livid, vivid green of the dragon, its wings unfolding like leaves, its tail uncoiling in curlicue peavines, its flame erupting in flowers of jacinth and crimson and blood and love, and when at last it was out of her, she almost collapsed under the sudden weight of cheers and praise and applause, as well as drinks bought not just for the the storytellers, but for the entire taven.
So it went the night-- the Trashscarf offered a song, and kept fluffing up the lyrics, to the annoyance of one old man in the crowd, who argued and bantered and was then parried into a "So how -DOES- it go?" And in response he treated the room to an off-key but deeply heartfelt rendition of the old wartime ballad, which the Waywalker joined in, his own rather good voice reaching warmly out, and one by one several others joined in, and it might still have been a bit off-key, but more than a couple of feels were had.
Trashsacrf said next to nothing about himself, but spent the evening conjuring other people's stories, people who'd never met before and those who'd been coming to this taven for years but never known their old buddy Jimothy could remember so many dirty limericks. They all left the tavern that night, on their separate ways, but somehow a little more connected with everyone in the room. The news and jokes and stories would pass themselves on, and the Way was a little less difficult to travel.
That night he slept in the hayloft over the stables of the Old Oak, the innkeeper's horse accepting the Waywalker's presence with a snort of equine laughter. In the morning, he left a copper for the horse's breakfast, and a silver for the innkeeper, and a few coppers more for the house, and was on his way. He hadn't any shortage of people to share breakfasts with that day, but was on the road as soon as he could manage. He left a piece of a loaf of bread on a porch rail, and a fish on a windowsill, and stopped at the well to draw a bucket of water for a thirsty dog on a chain. He was not a man of wealth, but he was a man of friends, and the whole world seemed a little brighter on a sunny morning on the road.
And he had the stories of the night before to sustain him. Most of them, he knew, were too metaphorical to be chased, but one in particular-- an incident that had happened to a friend of a neighbor's second cousin's groundskeeper -- rang like a bell of appealing truth-kernel flavors across his pineal palate. His hands busy as he walked, braiding bits of straw and string and stories into his scarf, he set off down the Way towards the "nearby village" where the strange occurence had almost very likely happened.
The rural urban legend in question was this: That in the time of harvest, a mysterious ghostly appartition, with a head made from a carved pumpkin, would appear to travellers out on the darkened roads and demand sacrifice. And that those this monster captured were vanished away to some horrible fate where they were never seen again. The fact that it was on the roads was what bothered Trashscarf-- sure, go be a horrible hungry haunt in some house or spooky orchard by the old hanging tree, but when you get in the Way, a Waywalker must respond.
These mysterious wanderers, like Trashscarf, often had some abilities they might have developed before finding the Way, and almost any of them would have been better at monster-slaying than Trashscarf, who didn't even bother to carry any weapons because he couldn't use them. His usual method was, in the words of Cooper, "plausible deniability, brazen nonchalance, and the wisdom to know which is appropriate at what point. (Heartwarming sincerity is really useful when it's useful, but that's like 20% of the time max.)"
Twilight was approaching, but the Waywalker was determined to cover as much territory as he could, so he set out with a slow, easy stride. He felt calm, his steps sure, his breath even. He had done this many times, he reminded himself aloud, and yet, somehow, this time felt different.
He knew it was unusual, for example, to have his shoes stolen by a cat.
... well, shit.
He knew it was unusual to have his shoes stolen by a cat, but he also knew that there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it. Besides, he walked barefoot as often as not, and it would probably do his soles good to feel the honest skin of the World for a change. He stamped along- this being autumn, the morning ground was quite cold, actually- and thought about autum and fall and pumpkins and the strange myths of harvests and the things that happen in the drawing-in darkness of the year. Trashscarf felt himself shiver, and it was not entirely due to the frost beneath his feet.
As he'd hypothesized, one day's brisk walk, about twice the pace of a market wagon, got him to the next village right around dusk. He intended to ask around about the pumpkin-head man, but first he spent some time making a few acquaintances. His conversation with a young boy, who was delighted by the darkly glowing nightflyer the Waywalker had caught along the way, led to a story about how he'd been born from a mighty sunbeam in the Hall of Glories. The story itself was not a particularly great one, but it had a nice moral about how all knowledge was worth having, and the boy, who had been a bit afraid of the stranger at first, smiled and gave Trashscarf a little wave as he left. Trashscarf smiled back and continued to make his way around the village.
That evening, the village's Moot was in session-- a sort of town hall, where townsfolk could discuss matters of common concern and listen to announcements from the Mayor, and the Waywalker was invited to sit in. The current issue at hand, it seemed, was the pumpkin-man, and many of the villagers were quite excited to see if Trashscaf had any good suggestions for what to do about it.
Apparently--
--(Trashscarf mentally gathered together the wooly thinking of anecdotes, arguments, varnished truths and outright lies, twisted them into a yarn thick enough to work with, and started knitting as best he could)--
--the pumpkin man appeared every autumn, and if you were a traveller caught out on the roads late at night, you might be spirited away... and you would be never heard from again! It was this last bit that had Trashscarf particularly intrigued-- murders were common enough, but true vanishings are something else again.
The townsfolk depended on the roads for trade, as harvest time was particularly vital and busy, and they couldn't simply avoid the roads until the threat of the pumpkin man had passed with the turn of the season. Since the time was already upon them, they were forming up into caravans-- the pumpkin man did not seem to threaten large groups-- to make the necessary journey to sell their harvest. But the larger the group, the slower the travel-- and that meant risking being caught out overnight in the realms of the pumpkin man, something not even the bravest carter was willing to do. And solitary travelers? Forget about it.
Trashscarf looked grim. Travel was impeeded. The Way was hampered. This was his calling, his duty was clear -- He must find some way to stop the pumpkin man, so that the Way can be walked once more. Of course, he was terrified.
He spoke up at last, saying, "Well, all right! I'll go talk to this gourd-headed goon and see if I can't squash him for you-- or at least find out what's happened to the missing people," he added, and then looked around hopefully, "Er-- anyone have any ideas for what I should do? You've been dealing with this problem a lot longer than I've even known about it."
The villagers conferred for a long time, and came back to Trashscarf with a plan: "We'll loan you one of the smaller wagons we use for local deliveries, and you can pretend you're driving it out on the road, and if the pumpkin man comes, you can fight him!"
"This does not inspire confidence in me, in any sense of the term," said Trashscarf cautiously. "How about some backup? You said he doesn't attack large groups."
"Yes but you want him to come, so you can fight him, so if he sees a large group, he won't show up."
"How about some of you tough guys come along and hide in the cart, under my tarp or some hay or something?"
The townsfolk conferred for a while, and then decided, "All right, we'll get some volunteers together, and they'll hide in the wagon-- but do you have any actual plan for how to defeat the pumpkin man?"
"I"ll throw pumpkins at him!" said Trashscarf brightly. The men all sighed, and Trashscarf frowned. "Nevermind. I've got it. I'll do it like this."
He calmed himself, took a few long breaths, then spoke again. "I'll put out some of my clothes for him to be attracted to, like a scarecrow! Then I'll sneak up on him while he's milling around looking at all my pretty robes, and I'll tie him up like this." He crossed his forearms over his chest, cupping his hands over his elbows. "Then, I'll throw him over my shoulder, like this." He picked up one of his wool rolled blankets and threw it over his shoulder, "And then you guys all come out of the cart and punch him until he tells us what he did with the people he's been taking."
"This sounds like a dumb plan," someone said.
"I know that was you," snapped Trashscarf. "I'd like to see you do better!" And while that may have worked for stories and songs, it shut this guy up pretty quick, because he wasn't that stupid.
So they did as bid and got the wagon all set up and ready-- Trashscarf stayed firmly in the bar, drinking cider with a rather determined look on his face, though his eyes weren't exactly in focus most of the time. Finally someone dragged him out, shoved him into the bench seat of a wagon loaded with a suspiciously deep pile of hay on which they'd piled many small pumpkins, put the reins of an old dry cow between the slats, and gave the decrepit animal a slap on the rump that send it ambling down the bleak black dusky dust of the outbound road. At least for about ten feet, but then Trashscarf quickly rigged a carrot hanging from a stick that seemed to work for both motivation and steering, although he had to replenish the carrot frequently.
And he kept up a running commentary on the scenery, and his thoughts on it, and his thoughts on things in general, so that the brave volunteers hiding in the back would not be bored or scared. If they were, they certainly gave no indication, and were quiet and still. Trashscarf admired their ability to keep still and quiet-- it was something he'd never been able to master, himself. The cart had only a tiny light in the form of a candle-lantern, but anything brighter wouldn't have been much use in the suspiciously-rising fog anyway.
"Well now," said Trashscarf, "That should do it."
And as he spoke those words, the cloud of fog solidified and drifted down, and the pumpkin man emerged! He looked just as he had looked in the stories that had reached Trashscarf's ears-- a tall, thin scarecrow-like figure, made of dried cornstalks and straw-stuffed bundles, with a gourd for a head, a gourd for a body, and a gourd for a hat. There was a lot of zucchini involved in there as well, because that has been the nature of zucchini since time immemorial when the first gods of late summer began to leave them on the porches of the proto-people.
He stood in the road, quite still, regarding Trashscarf and the pile of hay. He gave a sharp, piercing whistle-- a sound that set Trashscarf's teeth on edge. He reached up and took his gourd-hat off, to reveal a round, pumpkin-coloured head with a wide, toothy grin. It was kind of lopsided and looked like it hadn't been carved very well, and it was lit from within by a strange and eerie radience, like fireflies or foxfire or the flame of a small candle that was slowly burning within while the fog and the night creaked and rustled past as the seasons slowly shifted. That only made it worse.
"Hay!" shouted the pumpkin man, and his voice sounded all scratchy and low, like a chalkboard, "I have been waiting for you!"
"Is that so?" said Trashscarf, "well I think you've made a wrong turn here, pal, this is a one-way street-- I'm going the other way."
"Hay!" shouted the pumpkin man again, and he took an enormous step towards Trashscarf.
"Oooh!" said Trashscarf, "You're not getting me! Come on, guys!" He used the stick end of his carrot-stick to poke urgently down into the hay behind him, but the poking only hit hay, pumpkins, and the wood of the bottom of the cart. There was no-one there!
"How do you think you can defy me, and deny me my sacrifice!?" screeched the pumpkin man, his face twisting into shapes all scary.
"Sacrifice!" Trashscarf exclaimed, standing up in the seat in outrage. "What have you done with the townsfolk I was smuggling?"
"Are you volunteering?" growled the pumpkin man, puzzled. "No one's ever done that before."
"Actually I was just exclaiming, and about to follow it up with some form of pithy one-liner, or perhaps a bit of exposition, but at least we're talking, right?" He gave a cheerful grin into the face of the pumpkin man.
The pumpkin man frowned. "You don't seem scared of me at all," he said. "What's your trick? Why aren't you afraid?"
"I have a plan," he said.
"What plan?" demanded the pumpkin man. Then, more slowly, "What plan?"
"A plan. A plan that I have. To stop you."
"What plan?" the pumpkin man demanded.
"You repeat yourself a lot," Trashscarf said.
"What plan?" demanded the pumpkin man, while hissing through his teeth.
"I'm going to throw pumpkins at you," said Trashscarf, tossing one of the pumpkins in a two-handed throw, like a basketball, into its glorious destiny. The pumpkin missed the pumpkin man but Gallagher'd messily across the road nonetheless.
"AHAHAHAH, MY SACRIFICE!" bellowed the pumpkin man, as Trashscarf quaked in terror-- then the pumpkin man scooped up the spilled pumpkin and stuffed it into his pumpkin mouth with both hands. "Nomf nomf nomf nomf! Ahh! Thank you!" His jagged-gourd pumpkin face was now a happy grin!
"I don't understand," Trashscarf complained. "Why are you thanking me?" asked Trashscarf. "I thought you were mad at me."
"I was mad at you because I thought you were mad at me! It's all gone wrong up to now! But now you're throwing pumpkins at me, so I can't be mad at you any more!"
"Oh!" said Trashscarf. "That's good news! Because I was starting to get pretty nervous." He tossed another pumpkin, but missed again.
"But now I'm excited!" exclaimed the pumpkin man. "This is great! No one's ever thrown pumpkins at me before!"
"So are you like a ghost, or a god or something?"
"I was a god. Then I was a ghost. Then I was a legend, and now I'm talking to you," said the pumpkin man mysteriously.
"Some kind of harvest spirit that people used to sacrifice to, and probably somewhere in there they switched from blood to vegan alternative," mused Trashscarf, who'd picked up some of this from the multilayered flurry of information from the Moot. "And then when they forgot about you and stopped even giving you a symbolic share of the harvest crop, you got angry-- or waxed full wroth, I suppose-- and decided to take your own sacrifice like the old days?" He frowned. "I don't suppose you happen to have all the people you've taken still stored somewhere, have you?"
"I haven't taken any people," said the pumpkin man, his face contorting into a lopsided frown. "I just show up to ask and people run away screaming! It's very annoying!"
"But--" Trashscarf started to protest, pointing back at his wagonload of hay, but realized that his cargo of brave volunteers had been suspiciously quiet the entire time, and shut his mouth like a carp.
And now he recalled that of all the stories of disappearances, it was usually "I heard that someone" or "my friend's cousin" that was taken, and he sighed. "All right, I believe you. And I'm able to talk to you because of what I am, but the townsfolk just get scared, and it makes a better story if there's some danger other than being scared by what is, no offense, a rather goofy looking apparition."
"I don't care if they're afraid of me or not, as long as I get my sacrifice; pumpkins, splashed across the road so I can eat them!"
"Why across the road?" Trashscarf looked puzzled.
"Because they don't smash as good on soft grass, of course," said the pumpkin man, looking at Trashscarf like he was an idiot.
"That is true," Trashscarf admitted, nodding, and he grinned. "Okay, so-- if they smash pumpkins, you'll be satisfied and won't go around scaring them anymore?
"Don't worry," promised the pumpkin man, "As long as the townsfolk will remember me by smashing pumpkins in the roads, I will leave them alone!"
"It's a deal," said Trashscarf, extending his hand.
"I'm not a monster!" said the pumpkin man crossly. "I'm a person! I have feelings! This is the first time anyone's ever shaken my hand! So! We have a deal!"
"If you're a person," said Trashscarf, "Why do you only show up in stories and scare people?"
"Because I'm also a god," said the pumpkin man, and vanished.
"Well," said Trashscarf, turning around in the seat and frowning back at the hay, "I got us out of that one, and I didn't even have to kill anyone or sacrifice any farm animals!" He pulled his carrot-stick back up; the old cow had taken advantage of the distraction to eat the carrot and part of the string. "Don't all cheer at once, boys," he snorted to the nonexistant passengers under the hay. He seemed to be out of carrots, alas, but he cleared his throat and addressed the cow, "No more carrots, but I'll see to it that there's a bunch more in your barn back home--" and then had to hang on to the seat as the cow took off with a gait like a hexagonal rocking horse.
He made it back to the village, much to the surprise of the villagers, especially the ones that had volunteered to be his backup and had chickened out. They looked awkward and embarrassed, but Trashscarf made it all right by greeting them as though he'd never expected to see them again, and telling everyone how they had realized his plan was foolish so they'd snuck out of the wagon and presumably were planning to ambush the pumpkin man from all sides at Trashscarf's signal, and then looked expectantly at them, wanting to hear their side of the story of the exciting evening.
"That's not what happened," said one of them, who had been one of Trashscarf's louder supporters.
"I told you that was what happened!" said another. "I was there, I saw you talking to him after he took us out of the wagon!"
"IT WAS A DREAM!" said the other.
"No, it wasn't," said the first, "I was wide awake! I don't dream like that!"
"I was too!" said another. "It was real!"
The argument expanded, gaining in vehemence and credibility, until in the end they were all convinced that not only had they been taken in by a bad apple-- in this case, Trashscarf-- but that they had in fact been taken in so completely that they had been taken in by themselves. Being taken in by themselves was the dream, because it was so unlikely! They were mostly persuaded when Trashscarf pointed out that what they were doing was arguing in favor of the truth when the truth was obviously ridiculous.
"But why, if you're not a monster, come only at night?" asked one.
"Why indeed," said Trashscarf, with a mighty shrug.
"I'm telling you, it's how it happened--"
"Honestly," said Trashscarf, raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips. "I've seen some weird things in my day, and weirder parties of people, but I wonder if we're ever going to get off the ground and accept reality and get on with things?"
"I think we will," said the town's mayor, who had been standing on the sidelines through this, and now stepped forward. "Because we're not going to stop at this point. We're going to find out more about this, and we're going to make sure we never forget it again."
"Excellent!" said Trashscarf, beaming like a pumpkin himself.
Everyone began celebrating that they would no longer have to fear the pumpkin man, as long as they remembered to smash pumpkins on the road for him, and they started carving pumpkins with funny faces, so they would remember. So next time you see a smashed pumpkin on the road, know that pumpkin has been found worth of sacrifice by the Pumpkin Man himself!
And Trashscarf made sure the cow got her carrots, and the villagers gave Trashscarf a massive pumpkin pie and all the cider he could drink, and then he was on his Way once more, his bare feet kicking up drifts of autumn leaves along the road, while he braided a carrot-scented string back into his scarf, twined with cornsilk and the brittle curl of a dried pumpkin vine.