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Storyteller's Cabin |
Written by Tom Coleman
How many times have I heard that growing up in South Louisiana? Seems like every time I'd turn around to go outside my momma and papa would tell me, "Don't go into Patin's Pumpkin Patch. They got taties in there!"
Now for those of you who don't know, a tati is like a Cajun boogyman. They love to scare bad little childrens.
But I could never understand why outa all of the punkin patches in Acadia Parish, any Tati would want to live in Patin's pumpkin patch. I mean, it was all overgrown with weeds. And the punkins were so villain - ugly, all twisted out of shape.
My papa used to tell me stories about old man Patin, and how he put a gris gris on his punkin patch - you know, an evil spell to keep the taties there. He went out into that punkin patch one time a year, on Halloween night at midnight, to put a fresh gris gris on his field. Don't never go into Patin's punkin patch. They got Taties in there.
Well, me and my best friend Shawee, decided we was too old to believe in taties anymore. So we was gonna play a trick on old man Patin.
We sneaked into his punkin patch on Halloween night and we was gonna take our pocket knives and carve some Jack O' Lanterns out of them old scraggly punkins. Yeah, we was gonna fool old Patin into thinking that the Halloweenies had passed, and scare him real good.
We sat down with a couple of punkins and was just about to carve them up when we heard a noise, like something moving in the field. Me and Shawee stopped what we was doing and looked into the field. It was a full moom so we could see everything like it was daytime. But we couldn't see what was moving.
So I sat back down and was fixin to start cutting when I saw that someone had already carved a scary face into that punkin. I was surprised, but when I looked closer at it, it didn't look like it was carved at all. It looked different.
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