The Life and Times of Mervyn J. Pumpkin, Esquire
as dictated to Sasha, Vampiress
Excerpt from chapter 3: In the Fields
...I was just a little pumpkin, you see, barely off the vine, and I had been taken to the Fields. It was a great honor, the crows said. The Fields were where I would learn to fight.
I hear a lot of talk nowadays about the Fields, about temples and such, but don't you believe it. Scarecrows ain't got no use for temples. We fight as we have always lived...in the fields, among the harvest.
Now, I can just hear you saying, "This is Autumn, old man. It's always harvest." I know that! That's the point; we fight as we live, and we live in the fields among the harvest, and so that is where we go to learn the Way.
The Way. That's what I want to talk about today. The Way is what I went to the Fields to learn, though I learned many other things. I learned to fight, and think, and eventually to feel. But I'm getting all ahead of myself.
The Fields are big. So big that when you are in them you can't see anything but more field. Corn and hay and wheat, as far as the eye can see. And pumpkins, of course.
That's where it all started. The Way, I mean. Hay and pumpkins, and the folk that lived as one with them. Our folk. The scarecrows.
A lot of people don't understand how things became how they did, with scarecrows becoming fighters. We're soft and floppy, and our heads are huge. We're gangly and off-balance and skinny. But that's the secret. When I walked into the fields that day, I had no clue what it meant to be gangly and floppy. But I learned.
The Master was an old scarecrow named Charlie. He taught us to spin and whirl our gangly bodies around in the air, flying and flopping around until nothing could touch us. He taught us to take advantage of our softness, so that even when we were hit, it still couldn't hurt us. Finally, he taught us to hit so fast our gloved hands can't be seen, and to hit where it hurts.
He made us into warriors.
When the gravediggers and the golems fight, it makes sense. It's their nature. For us scarecrows, becoming fighters was a part of our Becoming, as an Essence. It made us what we are.
Hey, did I ever tell you about the time one of my crows tried to carry my skeleton friend Red's leg back to him after he laid a trap with it? Poor bird's trying to be helpful and Red's waving his hands around saying, "No, no!"
Laughs.
You know, skeleton faces ain't supposed to move, but I swear his eyes got wider and wider as that bird carried a ticking bomb back to him. Funniest thing I ever did see.