In the sweltering summer of a tiny Southern village, where magnolias slink lazily over dilapidated fences, old Jeb sat on his rickety porch, eying the watermelon patch with a wary skepticism. His neighbors whispered tales about his land, claiming the earth had been cursed by some vengeful spirit from the days when a grand plantation once stood. To hear Jeb tell it, none of it was true.

“Why’s it, Jeb,” Peter drawled as he leaned against a porch column gnawing on a blade of grass, “that your melons ain’t ever gonna come to fruit?”

Jeb spat to the side, ever the picture of stubborn dignity. “It’s all hogwash, Peter,” he grumbled. “Ain’t no curse, just bad luck.”

Yet, as the air thickened with the ripe scent of earth and unanswered apologies, some couldn’t help but feel a chill skitter across their skin whenever they crossed that very plot. Auggie, the railway conductor who’d settle each summer in the town, claimed he once saw a wraith-like figure tending the fields under the moonlight.

“You buying into that nonsense?” Peter said one evening, casting a sideways glance as Auggie took his place beside Jeb on the creaky old bench. The moon was swollen, spilling silver across their weathered faces.

“Can you think of a better reason for why them melons don’t never grow?” challenged Auggie. His voice had the tremor of belief, something solid beneath his usual tinny humor.

“Maybe they’s just ain’t got the knack for it,” Jeb replied, jowls quivering above his jaw. He heaved a sigh that seemed to echo from the dusty path to the rattling windows. “Every watermelon gone bad, split before it’s ripened. ‘Cept,” he mused, “only that one last year.”

Peter chuckled, a sound more bark than mirth. “Old Tom Dillingham ate it, he did. Swore it tasted like ashes before he went blind for a day.”

“He swore, too,” Auggie intoned with a chuckle, “he saw angels in that blindness.”

The laughter between the men subdued the oppressive weight of the dripping evening. From somewhere amongst the cottonwoods, the call of a whip-poor-will rose and fell like the village’s lone train.

Days wore into weeks, and the story of the ‘无效的watermelon’ traveled faster than the train that rolled through on iron tracks. Letters buzzed like gnats, flying north and south and east; some even reached distant kin who’d long forgotten how the fields twisted under Jeb’s watchful gaze.

“Dad burn that melon patch,” Peter said, restless one twilit dusk. “Reckon there’s a truth behind those curses, or it’s just folks and their tales.”

“I reckon,” Jeb replied, lowering his voice, “folks see their own fears in that patch. Same as they do in any other tale.”

There was a pause filled only with the whispering wind through dusk-darkened elms. Jeb fiddled with the brim of his hat, talking more to himself than to anyone else. “But if there’s a ghost clinging to that soil, ain’t it needing the weight of our eyes less than needing us to see our own lives reflected in what we deem unripe and wasted?”

And just as he’d answered, silence swallowed his words, leaving Peter and Auggie to ponder the unspoken bond among stories, the earth, and the peculiar flukes of fate.

A gunshot split the night air, reverberating through shadowed rafters where the owls sat watch, a stolen echo of thoughts half-formed and ambitions as futile as Jeb’s barren field. Then silence… and the empty seat that told its own tale.