After Carol seen it she was more than a little freaked mostly due to the fact that somehow the carving in the pumpkin seemed to know about it but John would not let her dwell on it for long even with having the picture of the pumpkin with the carving. As October turned into November, just as the realtor said the pumpkins were gone. While the season changed and got colder John made the house feel like a home with all of the cooking he was doing and as he cooked he ended up creating some new recipes for all of the pumpkins he had to work with.
With out realizing it before long he had himself a cookbook a couple hundred pages long full of recipes that one of the placed he had been donating the food to was pushing him to see if a publisher would pick up. With a little luck in no time he had a publisher for his cookbook and even though small it was another source of income for him and the lady who put it all into the house. They did this since the good luck seemed to happen after they moved in and so that the house would be ready when their baby arrived.
As autumn turned to winter the house went from the wreck that they walked into back in early autumn to a beautiful home and it was the first time in a great many years that the neighbors were happy to see the house there. Even though there was almost no one in the neighborhood that ever recalled there being someone living there let a lone having owners who actually took care of it, all those years of seeing it in shambles became a blur to them and slowly faded from their memories.
In early January, it was unseasonably warm for about a wee, so they went out and started clearing the land with the neighbors help everyone helping worked into the early evening each day to help clear the land. After a few acres were cleared, they realized that there were a number of good acres to work with in terms of growing their own food and figured they would let the neighbors who helped clear the land use a few acres of their land for a neighborhood farm as payment for their help if they wished to try their luck with growing a garden. While planning how much land to let their neighbors use and where on the land the community garden would be, they were approached by one of their neighbors about the scarecrow.
The neighbors had noticed that the scarecrow had somehow moved from the place that it had been in, on the day they started clearing the land and by the time they were done a few days later, it had moved a good distance towards the house unnoticed. They also noticed that it had a cloth banner that appeared to be very badly weathered and stretched from outstretched hand to outstretched hand. They wanted to know if they knew who did this where it happened while they were busy in the fields clearing the land, even though everyone was too busy to move the scarecrow or to hang the banner.
John and Carol were just as perplexed as their neighbors regarding this since they themselves had put the scarecrow up the day they moved into the house and made sure that the bracing for him would not be going anywhere. They figured that someone played a joke on the neighbors as they worked and moved the scarecrow with everyone being too busy to notice that someone was messing with the scarecrow but didn’t know how they would have gotten the banner would have gotten there without someone noticing.
After a few days everyone put the whole thing with the scarecrow behind them especially since it wasn’t worth making a big deal of it where no one would own up to moving him. What John and Carol did notice as they laid out the boundaries for the community garden was that the cloth banner did start looking less and less weathered as the days went by.
A week before their baby was due they noticed that a faint phrase started to appear on the banner that the scarecrow was holding. About a week before the baby was due, the words became legible enough to make out “we welcome the new baby” which freaked out both of them and they even went to their neighbors who helped clear the land to see if they new anything about it. Each neighbor in turn swore up and down that it wasn’t them and that they didn’t know who was doing the stuff with the scarecrow, the guy and lady knew that their neighbors were telling the truth but yet they wanted to believe otherwise.
A couple days before Carol went into labor her and John started hearing voices on the wind whispering a name almost like someone was calling the person but not wanting to be too obvious about it. A week to the day that the letters on the banner that the scarecrow was holding Carol went into labor, to the surprise of both the everyone the baby came quicker than what they had expected given the stories that they had heard about how bad labor can be for first time mothers.
When it came to naming their new baby, they were tossing names back and forth then out of the blue John said the name that he had heard blowing in the wind a couple days earlier saying that he hasn’t been able to get the name out of his head since he heard it the other day. Carol stopped trying to think of names and thought about the name. After a few minutes, Carol unexpectedly said, “why don’t we give him that name?” for which John agreed and with that they gave their new son the name which was Timothy.
After a few days in the hospital, they were able to bring their new son home. When they got there they found a few of their neighbors outside waiting for them and found the scarecrow out in the front yard with the banner that he had been holding now saying welcome home Tim. At first they didn’t notice the scarecrow until they were done with all of the welcomes and well wishes from their neighbors. When they did notice the scarecrow they went to ask who moved it out here only to be stopped by a neighbor who said that it was already here when we came here to wait for you.
John asked if a couple of the neighbors could put the scarecrow back to where he belonged and said that everyone was welcome to come in for a short time. With that everyone entered the house. While Carol brought Tim to their bedroom which was just off of the kitchen and put him in his crib, John went into the kitchen and started putting together a few appetizers for their neighbors. The neighbors all wanted to help with making things to eat so they more or less kicked John out of his kitchen so he can relax a little.
Inevitably while talking, the subject of the scarecrow moving seemingly on his own and how getting the banner got there came up. No one new how it kept on moving, who gave it the banner or even how the banner was able to write the lettering on it by itself. Carol while settling Tim in his crib ended up mentioning what had, happened with the pumpkins, more specifically the little pumpkin that ended up with the face of a baby with in a couple days of them moving in even with no one in the neighborhood even knowing them or that she was pregnant.
As everyone was talking, little bits and pieces of the property came out with not one person knowing a lot but what everyone did know came from stories and rumors from older people in the town and few older couples that had been in the neighborhood for many years that had only moved away or died months before the couple bought the house.
All anyone knew for sure was that there were strange things that happened in the past in the house and on the property that the old timers would never speak of in any detail. Every time anyone would try to get what had happened on the property, the old timers would just say that it’s best left in the past and would not say anymore. Each time the property came up with old timers around they would get this look about them as if they were horrified, and if they could they would go out of their way to change the subject.
Carol after coming out of the bedroom asked, how come the house had been on the market for so long. She was told that it was do to the old timers scaring potential buyers away with stories that no one could back up, which is how the rumors and stories were spread. Carol did go into detail about the strange happenings that occurred over time in the house, but it was more like the house almost coming out of a deep sleep and shaking off all sleep. She mentioned the fact that as time went on even on the first day there that the house almost seemed to fix itself enough to be livable when no one was looking, but nothing else inside the house.
John then asked if anyone knew the realtor that had sold the house to them, for which no one could say that they did. They said that she didn’t start coming around until the last of the old timers was gone from the neighborhood and even still she would not stay long she just looked like she was there to check out the place and that was it. They went on to say that this you guys were the first people in more than a generation to look at the house due to the old timers. With that they all just agreed that the rumors and stories concerning the property was just a little to weird to keep talking about, let alone thinking about it and changing the subject to something more entertaining.
