He had been describing the events of Halloween Eve, and he began to speak of the weather that night, colder even than usual, well below freezing, colder than a witch’s tit, he said, that first cold night when you know winter’s a-coming in and there is nothing you can do about it and once again it is too goddamned late to head south. You just put your head down, bub, and you accept it.
The change, the shift, may well have been in me, of course, not Wade. He used the same words he always used, the same clichés and oddly reflective expressions; he affected the same weary stoicism he has affected since adolescence; he sounded, to all intents and purposes, the same as always — yet I heard him differently. One minute his story did not matter to me; the next minute it mattered in every way. One minute my mind and eyes were focused on the television screen in front of me, a Boston Celtics game with the sound turned off, and then suddenly I was visualizing Lawford Center on Halloween Eve.
Which is not difficult for me to do: in the fifteen years since I last spent a Halloween there, which is to say, since I was in high school, the place has not changed much. In fifty years it has not changed much. But visualizing the place, going there in memory or imagination, is not something I care to do. I studiously avoid it. I have to be almost tricked into it or conjured. Lawford is one of those towns that people leave, not one that people come back to. And to make matters worse, to make it even more difficult to return to, even if you wanted to go back — which of course no one who has left the town in this half century wants to do — those who remain behind cling stubbornly as barnacles to the bits and shards of social rites that once invested their lives with meaning: they love bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, funerals, seasonal and national holidays, even election days. Halloween, as well. A ridiculous holiday, and for whom, for what? It has absolutely no connection to modern life.
But Lawford has no connection to modern life, either. There is a kind of willed conservatism that helps a remnant people cope with having been abandoned by several generations of the most talented and attractive of its children. Left behind, the remnant feels inadequate, insufficient, foolish and inept — everyone with brains and ambition, it seems, everyone with the ability to live in the larger world, has gone away. So that with the family, with the community as a whole, no longer able to unify and organize a people and provide them with a worthy identity, the half-forgotten misremembered ceremonies of ancient days become all the more crucial to observe. As in: Halloween. The rites affirm a people’s existence, but falsely. And it is this very falsity that most offends those of us who have left. We know better than anyone, precisely because we have fled in such numbers, that those who refused or were unable to leave no longer exist as a family, a tribe, a community. They are no longer a people — if they ever were one. It is why we left in the first place and why we are so reluctant to return, even to visit, and especially on holidays. Oh, how we hate going home for the holidays! It is why we have to be coerced into it by guilt, or tricked, if not by ourselves, then by the wider, sentimental culture. I teach history; I think about these things.
Wade rambled on, half drunk, as usual, calling from his wind-battered trailer by the lake up there in Lawford, and I envisioned the town he was talking about, the people he alluded to, the hills and valleys, the forests and streams he passed in his car on his way home every night and out again in the morning to work, the diner where he stopped for breakfast, the well-drilling company he worked for, the town hall where his part-time police chief’s office was located: I visualized the setting for my brother’s life as it had been a night or two before, when the events he was describing to me had taken place.
The air was dry, and the sky clear as black glass, with belts and swatches of stars all over and in the southeast a crescent moon grinning. I remember those cold fall nights, with the smell of oncoming snow in the air. On the side of the hill, between the spruce woods climbing the eastern ridge of the valley and the long yellow meadow that slopes toward the river at the bottom, a bony thicket of birches clings like a brief porous interval. The river below is narrow, rock-strewn, noisy, with a forested moraine on the farther bank and a two-lane road running north and south along the near. This is the town I grew up in.
There is a row of large, mostly white houses that face the road from the east. Vehicles following pale wedges of light roamed north and south along the road. Some of them pulled in and parked at the center of town, where there are three steepled churches, a two-story wood-frame town hall and an open square and a ball field; others stopped in front of one or another house in the settlement; while short strings of small dark figures raveled and unraveled along the shoulders of the road and entered and departed from the same houses visited by the cars.
Imagine with me that on this Halloween Eve up along the ridge east of the settlement it was still and silent and very dark. The wind was down, as if gathering for a storm, and from the houses below not even a watchdog’s bark floated this far. The moon had just slipped behind the spruce-topped black ridge. Suddenly out of the thicket of birches a small gang of boys, five or six short shadowy figures, emerged running from the woods. Their breath trailed behind them in white streaks, and they darted like a pack of feral dogs downhill over the crumbly ground of the meadow, then sneaked across the scoured backyard of a neat white Cape Cod house with barn and sheds attached at the far side, where, as if at last sighting their prey, the boys dashed around the corner of the barn toward the front.
They wore knit caps and brightly colored jackets and were ten or twelve years old. Twenty years before, I might have been among them, or ten years before that, Wade himself. Indian file, they slipped along the side of the house that faced Main Street, ducking under windows and around a single Scotch pine. At the edge of the porch, they gathered into a group and ran straight to the front steps and seized two large lighted jack-o’-lanterns that had been posted there.
The boys lifted the tops of the pumpkins with purpose, as if releasing imprisoned spirits, and for a second their small faces were transformed, turning them orange and wild. With a puff, they extinguished the candles and raced with the dead jack-o’-lanterns back into darkness, grinning to one another with fear and pleasure, as if they had stolen a giant’s beloved goose.
Silence. A moment later a yellow Ford station wagon, seams and rocker panels rotted by rust, pulled up in front of the same house, and the driver, a thick-bodied young woman wearing a cloth coat and blue ski cap and gloves, got out, opened the back door and helped two tiny costumed children — one a fairy godmother with a wand, the other a vampire wearing huge blood-tipped plastic incisors — exit from the car. Lugging shopping bags, the children followed the mother to the front door of the house, where they climbed the steps and the mother rang the bell.
The door opened, and a woman with crisp features and short white hair stood in the doorway. A person of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and seventy, she wore green twill trousers and shirt and men’s work shoes, and her pointy face was expressionless for a second. From the bottom of the steps the children held their bags out to be filled and shrieked, “Trick or treat!” and the white-haired woman opened her eyes wide, as if startled. Flopping long hands in front of her chest, the woman, whose name is Alma Pittman, feigned alarm. She is the town clerk and a certified public accountant and notary public and is not skilled at amusing children. I knew her when I was a boy, and she has changed not at all.