I finished handing out the treats, shut the door, and turned back with the bowl of candy. Mooshum was gone.
“Don’t look yet!” he cried from the kitchen.
I walked straight back to see what he was up to, and nearly dropped over. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts made of tissue-thin cotton, and he was stretching a big wet hunk of Mama’s fresh, soft, new-risen bread dough over his head. He’d plopped it there and now it oozed horribly down his face, his neck, over his shoulders. His ears stuck out of the dripping mask. Strings of dough hung around his arms and he’d taken more bread dough and slapped it on his chest and stomach and thighs. His eyes peered out of the white goo, red and avid as a woodpecker’s. He’d filled his mouth with ketchup. When he grinned, it leaked from his toothless mouth and down his chin. He saw my face, whirled, and ran out the back door. There was a clamor of voices yelling trick or treat. I dropped the bowl and chased him out the back door, but he’d already disappeared. I was creeping around the front when I saw him rise from the yew bush, the flashlight trained on himself from underneath. He shrieked — a barely human, shocking squeal. He tottered toward the kids and I knew when he grinned the ketchup grin, because the five boys yelled in fright and broke ranks. Three bolted and sprang off quick as jackrabbits. One dashed a little way before he tripped. The last one picked up a rock and winged it.
The rock hit Mooshum square in the center of his forehead. He fell full length, the flashlight skidding out of his fist, just as my parents drove up and jumped out of the car. I picked up the flashlight and trained it on Mooshum as Dad turned him over. Mama fell to her knees. Mooshum’s eyes were wide-open, staring, and his forehead was bleeding all down his nose and cheeks. Mama put her arms around Mooshum’s shoulders and shook him, trying to make his eyes focus. I knelt beside him and tried to take his pulse, but I can hardly find my own pulse so I couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. I put my ear to his chest.
“Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Dad.
Mooshum woke and trained his eyes with great affection on my mother. “A good one, that.”
Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. He snored once. Mom said, “What’s he covered with?” I answered, “Bread dough.” We waited for the next snore. There wasn’t one. Dad bent over Mooshum, pinched his nose shut, tipped his head back and opened his jaw with his thumb. He blew a long breath into Mooshum. Ketchup bubbled and leaked down Mooshum’s neck.
“Did his chest move?” Dad wiped the ketchup off his mouth. He didn’t even ask about the ketchup.
“Yeah.”
He bent over and blew four more times into Mooshum. Then Mooshum stirred and coughed himself back to consciousness.
We decided to load him into the car, and in the relief of the moment we seemed to carry Mooshum effortlessly. I sat in the backseat with his head in my arms, and as we sped toward the hospital I felt his breath go out, and not come in, but then start up, like a sputtering outboard.
In the emergency room, he caused a stir. The nurses called everyone else over to look at him in his bread dough until Dad got mad, said, “Quit gawking. You’re supposed to be professionals!” and shut the curtain around us. The doctor on call made it to the emergency room in five minutes. He was a young doctor, doing his government payback with the IHS, and he stepped around the curtain still shrugging on his white coat. The nurses must not have told him about the ketchup and the bread dough, but the doctor did pretty well. His mouth shook but he withheld laughter. Mooshum frowned in the bread dough mask, the ketchup drooling out the corners of his mouth, down his neck. Mama touched his hands tenderly and lightly as she folded them onto his chest. As we stood there looking at Mooshum, it seemed that his face slowly changed, relaxing into contemplation; contentment at the corners of his mouth. Dad gasped and wiped his face. The nurses were out there again, listening to us. We stood there for an endless amount of time, in a buzzing suspension.
“He looks happy,” said Mama. “He looks like he’s coming back.”
Mooshum started breathing steadily.
“I’m going to die now,” he sighed.
“No you’re not, Daddy.”
“Yes, I am. I want my lovergirl to visit me. Here in the hospital. Call Neve! It is my final request!”
“They’re not even going to keep you here, Daddy. They’re letting us take you home.”
“No, baby girl, I am gone.” He appeared to pass out, and Mama shook him, but just then Father Cassidy bounded lightly between the curtains. He had a spark in his eye and the good book in his hands. Mama would not step aside, so the priest had to crane to look into Mooshum’s face.
“Am I still in time?” he asked loudly. “One of the nurses sent word.”
Mooshum frowned and opened his eyes.
“There is time! How fortunate!” Father Cassidy muttered a fervent prayer. He had the Holy Oils along in a little kit. He began to fussily arrange them on the stainless steel bedside table. Mooshum gave a groan of irritation and sat up.
“If you won’t let me die in peace, then I’ll live, though I do not want to. You won’t get me this time, Hop Along, I’ll extend my life!”
Mooshum swung his legs over the side of the table and stood shakily. Dad and Mama held him from either side. He drooled a last bit of ketchup. “I have been told in the Indian heaven we live with the buffalo. I am content with that. Anyway, you have already spoken for me in the church. I couldn’t have wished for a better send-off.”
“I’ve apologized for that dozens of times,” said Father Cassidy. He began with hurt dignity to pack away his vials of oil and to primly refold the starched white napkins that came in his kit.
Mama helped Mooshum into Dad’s topcoat. He seemed stronger by the minute. He was still shedding dough, in dried flakes now. Father Cassidy noticed and asked what happened.
“He put dough on himself,” I said.
Father Cassidy shook his head and snapped the top of his handy leather case. He was still talking cozily to the nurses when we left. A year later, he quit the priesthood, went home, grew a beard, and became an entrepreneur. He sold Montana beef, shipped it to Japan and all over the world. We’d see him on billboards and in his TV commercials. His distinctive skipping bound, his calflike and happy energy, became a trademark for the beef industry and made him very rich.
BEFORE I WENT back to school that weekend, Corwin came to my house and picked me up. We got into his car and drove out to a deserted place far off in the middle of a flat field where we could see lights coming from a distance. We climbed into the backseat with the windows half open — it was an unusually warm November night — and we kissed. Strange, intimate, brotherly. Then hurting each other, greedy with heat. We pulled our clothes away but suddenly stopped, confused, overwhelmed by a shy aversion. We sat there holding hands until we dozed off. The light lifted and the edges of the earth showed streaks of fire. The sun would rise soon. I studied Corwin in the soft gray light. His face looked swollen and bruised — we were all cramped and stiff from sleeping bent together. Maybe he’d been crying, secretly. He stroked my face, tucked my hair behind my ears, then put his other hand between my legs.
“Hey, Evey?” Corwin’s teeth flashed. “You and me are supposed to marry. We’re supposed to love unto death, until death do us part.” His face was serious and exciting with the light creeping in a blaze up his throat and mouth. His eyes were masked in a slash of shadow.
“We’ll go to Paris,” he said. “We’ll visit Joseph at the U and take a plane from there. Paris, just like you always wanted. We’ll fuck in the street, fuck in the cathedral, fuck in the fucking coffee shops, you know?”