Personal Voice

Halloween in 1962 started just as it always did at our house.

My mother bought bags and bags of cellophane-wrapped candy and dumped them in a huge plastic bowl decorated with ghosts and pumpkins. She collected all the out-grown socks and gloves for trick-or-treaters who came unprepared for the frigid Idaho evenings and put them in a box next to the door. Then she donned a blonde wig that made her look like Glinda the Good Witch.

I struggled to put on my parka over my scarecrow costume while my younger sister, Linda, attempted to stuff her princess dress into her snowsuit. My youngest sisters, Kathy and Cindy, were too young to go, but they hovered over the candy bowl, contemplating its contents. My dad was stretched out in his recliner, snoring softly.

That night, ghosts and witches and movie stars and cartoon characters thronged the streets of our small town, squealing in mock terror, rattling their brown paper bags, and shouting, “Trick or Treat!” at every door.

The costumed crowd flowed up the sidewalk to our front step. They thronged onto the porch, thrust their paper sacks toward the plastic bowl, and, upon receiving a scoop of goodies, turned, and scurried off into the dark toward the next house. Every kid knew when the candy ran out, the house lights went out. There is nothing worse on Halloween night than a dark house and a slow trick-or-treater.

With our own brown paper sacks in hand, Linda and I pushed our way through the mobs of kids flooding up our front walk. It was easier to go through the back door but, Patches lived in the back yard.

Patches. That’s what we named the brown-and-white Shetland pony Dad brought home from the carnival. Not that he worked at the carnival. He was a welder who went out to fix the axis in the ride-a-pony tent. The carnival people couldn’t pay Dad so he, remembering the horse pictures on my bedroom walls, took the pony and a tiny black saddle in payment. He set her up in our fenced back yard.

Patches was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, from her furry brown head and stiff black mane to the white patch on her rump in the shape of Florida. She was smart, too, and had lots of experience with kids. For instance, she knew how to play games. One of her favorites was the one where the kid had to jump onto the saddle before she caught the back of your leg with her teeth. Then if you got into the saddle fast enough to avoid her playful nip, you’d slip off her other side and plunge to the ground. She seemed to get a good laugh out of it and stamped her approval on the back of your leg as you lay there.

She was a good escape artist, too. We had to be careful to close the back gate as we left the yard, because Patches slipped out faster than a greased snake and headed down the alley to snack on Mrs. Gherkin’s honeysuckle bush.

Going out the front door, that night, we were secure in the knowledge Patches was secure in the back yard. Besides, we’d turned off the light.

It was not to be.

Just about the time Linda and I headed across 9^th Street on our regular Halloween rounds, Mom heard the back doorbell ring. She paused with her hands full of treats. Did someone come from the alley through the back gate? They would have known to latch the gate, wouldn’t they?  

“Richard,” she hollered, “go check the back gate!”

Dad snorted but didn’t wake up.

Mom shoved the candy bowl at her two youngest daughters. “You know what to do. I’ll be back in a minute.”

At the back door, a pair of pirates waved their rubber swords at her. “Argh! Trick or treat!” They rattled their sacks. She looked past them into the dim back yard. By the streetlight she could see the gate was open. Pushing the pirates aside, Mom hurried through the yard and into the alley.

Patches was busy munching Mrs. Gherkin’s leafless honeysuckle when she looked back over her shoulder, a hunk of honeysuckle branch stuck out of her mouth.

Mom stepped forward, reaching out as if she had a sugar cube in her hand. “Whoa, pony. C’mon Patches. C’mon.”

Probably confused by the Glinda the Good Witch wig, Patches snorted once, reared back as much as a pony could rear back, and took off down the dark alley.

Mom was never known for her patience, but her determination was another matter. With a gazillion kids in her front yard, her toddlers running loose in the house, and her husband unconscious in his Laz-Y-Boy, she had to snag that pony and fast.

Scores of citizens of our small town witnessed the ensuing rodeo. A couple of parents complimented Mom on the speed and agility that could qualify her for the Olympic Track Team. All of them remarked how, under those circumstances, Mom still clung to the end of the galloping Patches’ tail. And they wondered how she could see with her wig hanging off her head like a raw egg yolk off the edge of a table.

Some high-spirited trick-or-treaters saw an opportunity for Halloween hilarity when they joined Mom in a full-bore linear sprint toward J Street.  Squealing, sacks rattling, feet pounding, ghost sheets flapping, the growing mob turned the corner onto the street.

Up ahead, astonished trick-or-treaters scrambled and shrieked as they fled the oncoming stampede led by a small horse. They swarmed over cars and tore through landscape plantings along the street.

Abandoned by the trick-or-treaters, adults were frozen to their front steps, their bowls of Halloween candy in their hands, and their mouths hanging open as first the screaming children fled past followed by Patches and Mom who, by then, was attached to the pony’s furry rump like a carbuncle.

Being a cordial woman, Mom tried to nod to the astonished neighbors as she passed. Bishop Thurburr called out, “How are you this evening?”

“Fine, Bishop,” Mom panted, sweat rolling into her eyes, “We’re just fine.” Her wig snagged on the bishop’s mailbox, but Mom didn’t stop.

At the end of the block, Mr. Hansen observed the riotous scene from his porch and leapt into action. He sprinted into the street, intercepting the pony and the woman clinging to its side.

Mom yelled, “Grab her halter and don’t let go!”

Mr. Hansen complied and tried to use his heels as brakes, but Patches turned a sharp left and scraped Mr. Hansen right off on an old fence across the alley from Dr. Barnes’s house. Mr. Hansen’s yelling and swearing brought Doc Barnes to the side door. 

There is debate why Patches chose that moment to stop right in the middle of Doc Barnes’s wilting tomato patch. She snorted and stamped around on the tomato plants but, at last, Mom took hold of her halter. Mom claimed she heard Patches snickering.

The pony came along easily enough, her little shoes glinting merrily off the sidewalk. At Bishop Thurburr’s house, his mailbox looked forlorn without the Glinda the Good Witch wig. He went out and helped look but it was not found

Most of the trick-or-treaters had disappeared by then, leaving trails of glistening candy wrappers on the sidewalks. The scent of processing sugar beets wafted on the air. Dry snowflakes swirled gently in the beam of the streetlights. Our porch light was dark, though.

Dad was still stretched out in his recliner, snoring softly, and our little sisters sat on the floor in front the of the tv, mesmerized by Rawhide. Bits of cellophane candy wrappers littered the floor around an empty candy bowl.

 “What happened to the candy?” I asked them.

They turned to me grinning. The answer covered their sticky faces and hands.

“Did you eat all that candy?”.

They nodded happily.

“But, if you ate the candy, what did you give the trick-or-treaters?”

“Socks,” Kathy replied matter-of-factly.

“And underpants,” Cindy added with a giggle.

The next day, we spotted Mom’s wig on top of the flagpole outside the county jail. It finally blew off in March, but Mom didn’t think she’d be using it anymore.