AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The scale said 894.5 pounds. It was the largest pumpkin ever weighed in this county, it beat last year’s winning number by better than a hundred pounds, and it was the only entry on the platform Saturday morning, because the man who has spent eleven weeks in this newspaper’s letters column arguing about carts and gates was standing in the crowd with his hands in his pockets, having withdrawn on Thursday afternoon.

M. Aakre found the split Thursday morning — a shoulder crack, four inches, the kind that opens quietly overnight when a fruit puts on twenty pounds in a week and the skin declines to keep up. He telephoned the horticulture superintendent at 11 a.m., scratched the entry, and asked that it not be announced until Saturday, “so the man doesn’t spend two days deciding how to feel about it.” The superintendent honored the request. Bjornstad learned of it at 9:40 Saturday morning, twenty minutes before the weigh-in, from Verna Tho, who says he stood still for a moment and then said, “Well, that’s no good.”

What followed was the strangest ceremony this fair has staged. Two hundred people came out for a contest with one contestant. The pumpkin came off the trailer on a sling and four volunteers, went onto the certified scale, and registered a number that would have won any weigh-in ever held here by any measure anyone could name. The crowd applauded for a long time. The winner accepted a purple ribbon, a check for forty dollars, and congratulations from perhaps sixty individuals, and this newspaper watched him look for the same person in the crowd about a dozen times.

They spoke afterward, briefly, by the scale, out of the hearing of everyone including this reporter, which is why it is not printed here. What is printable is what Bjornstad said when asked for a comment on the number. “It’s a good pumpkin,” he said. “It isn’t an answer. An answer takes two.” Asked whether he would say more, he said he had a letter to write and that we would print it, which we have, on the opinion page, along with one from the man who scratched.

The pumpkin goes to St. Paul. Entries for the State Fair’s giant-pumpkin weigh-off close this week and the fair opens Thursday, and Bjornstad has borrowed a flatbed trailer and a tarp from his neighbor and intends to haul it down Wednesday night, in the dark, driving fifty. He has been advised by three separate people that the numbers down there begin around a thousand pounds and go up sharply from there, and that nobody from this county has ever placed. “I’m aware,” he said. “I’m not going down there to place. I’m going down there to see what it looks like next to the real ones. Then I’ll know what I’m doing next spring.”