"Flowers for Halloween" by Roy Hahne
Flowers for Halloween ©
It was the rolling hills of anywhere. Nothing looked manicured or healthily farmed. I grew up on what some would have called a hobby farm, but perhaps that is too clean a description. It was a failing farm among a group of failing farms cradled in the riotously-forested Cattaraugus County. These crouched houses and barns with their sway-back roofs, like barnacles on an eel, dotted the curving road.
When I think back to that place and time, I think of the scraggly fields of late summer, that time when fall is but a breath away, dying into the temporary moldy sleep of the year. Chicory, tall with spiky, colonial-blue petals and twisting, thin stems bending towards the ground as if badly engineered lined every waste path. They were a pretty flower, but without the grace of blooming earlier in the year, to me, they were blooms of ending. With this yearly wilting of the warmth, most children courted impending Halloween with its pandering for sweets and the wearing of thin, nylon costumes with plastic paint across their chests in letters proclaiming “Superman,” or “Cinderella.” The costumes were completed with cheap capes; cardboard, glitter-sprinkled crowns and plastic masks that often slipped down over our eyes. Breath condensation made a heavy sweat on the lip.
Running from home to home, rustling through the fallen leaves and smelling the acrid fragrance of burning jack-o-lantern lids never appealed to me. I ran with the other kids, knocked on doors because it was expected and I didn’t want mother talking to her friends on the phone again whining the words, “I don’t know what is wrong with her. She is so different from the others.” Sometimes I would catch mother looking at me with a puzzled eye. I learned quickly that to avoid being watched with that look I could mimic the children around me; so I played at liking Halloween, the death holiday that wedded the death of nature once a year.
I was ten years old when my inner observation melded with my outer life. I had decided long ago that children were hoodwinked into enjoying the loss of summer, this habitual serenade that death was a celebration when I felt it the frenzied human craze that historically had followed Black Plague into a castle…this human need to turn from the eventuality of demise especially when it was imminent; so like all of the Halloweens behind me initially I was not looking forward to my tenth one any more than the ones that preceded it.
It was the first year that mother did not buy me a nylon costume. She told me that this year I could make my own creation. I thought Halloween might be fun this time around. Not that the celebration had somehow lightened from its darkness, but I had a questing mind and piecing together fabric, pillows or whatever I could find around the farm to use as a disguise excited me.
I ended up dressed as a flower child. It was 1968. I played on the concept of “flower child,” and instead of long, straight hair, love beads and peace signs, I was a literal flower child. I picked the late-summer, spindly flowers and weeds from the pathways that criss-crossed the farm. I tucked and pinned them in my hair, up the sleeves of my jacket, tied them to my legs and taped them to a paper plate with eye holes cut into it.
We, in a group of costumed farm children of a variety of ages, headed out for our night of candy gathering. I realized on some level that the farmers and their wives got a tad of joy from seeing us at their front doors. It was a reprieve perhaps from the heaviness of farming, and I must admit on my 10th Halloween I had fun going to the neighbors’ houses and smiling through my paper plate mask as I told them with glee, “I am a flower child!
Eventually our motley collection of pillow cases and grocery bags, although far from full, grew heavy, and the younger children began to flag and yawn; so we headed back to our homes along the side of the road, kicking pebbles ahead of our feet. Smithy Weston, the oldest of our crew at age 13, tried to scare the rest of us by jumping every few feet and calling shrilly, “What was that?” He pulled my pig tail woven full of now wilted, wild flowers. When I jerked my head around and looked him in the eye, he shrugged his shoulders, made his eyes very big and said, “What?” Us older children kept the young ones ahead of us like we were herdsmen and they were our sheep. Just as we were coming up on Willow Bend (this particular bend in the road had a name of its own, because on the other side of the willows was our favorite swimming pond) Taylor Martin, the youngest of our Halloween group, five years old and having been in kindergarten for only a couple of months, danced out onto the road way, singing some thing he had learned in school about a pumpkin dance. He lifted his knees up high like he was marching, then turned around a couple of times. He shook his hands over his head and sang, “Pumpkins orange and round, Smiling without sound. Carved by children’s hands across these scary lands. Good night, Good night. To all this Halloween fright.” That is what I remember, but the song could have been something different. I do remember his little body turning in the shadowy night. If I close my eyes it dances there still.
The head lights came around Willow Bend without warning. There had been no dim beam of their approach or if it had existed we all failed to notice. Taylor disappeared without a cry as if a wizard had touched him with a magic wand. It is a flash of memory; the abrupt end of Taylor’s song, the blinding lights; the youngest disappearing under that brightness; hollow, double thumps; the screech of tires; the chorus of our children’s voices as if railing against the vulgarity of the moment. I noticed the davenport, pot belly stove and two, damp cardboard boxes in the bed of the pick-up truck as it pulled to the side of the road.
I saw little Taylor, seemingly even smaller than he had been before, spread out and untidy, his body half on and half off the road. His head was no longer round like a cantaloupe, but slightly misshapen, and his eyes stared off to the left. His neck twisted and his torso, arms and legs were in the opposite direction from his face. Both of his shoes had flown off his feet and his costume had ripped down the seam on one side. His mask was still around his neck where he had pushed it low while performing his pumpkin dance for us.
Ahead on the road, I could see smashed pumpkin pieces scattered where the teenagers of the neighboring farms had spiritedly dashed them. I thought I could still hear their laughter in the woods. I saw a boy in a skeleton costume holding a little girl dressed as a witch very close. She was crying, her head buried in his plastic painted rib cage. They may have been the Carlson’s children. I don’t remember.
I looked back to Taylor’s lifeless body on the road where a dark stickiness was growing like a halo around his head. Then slowly I looked up to where the stars were cold pinpoints against the dark sky. My head tilted back as far as I could, not moving my eyes at all, I turned my body half way around until I found the lights of the big dipper. It was still there like neon dots on a wet and endless chalk-board.
It was the rolling hills of anywhere. Nothing looked manicured or healthily farmed. I grew up on what some would have called a hobby farm, but perhaps that is too clean a description. It was a failing farm among a group of failing farms cradled in the riotously-forested Cattaraugus County. These crouched houses and barns with their sway-back roofs, like barnacles on an eel, dotted the curving road.
When I think back to that place and time, I think of the scraggly fields of late summer, that time when fall is but a breath away, dying into the temporary moldy sleep of the year. Chicory, tall with spiky, colonial-blue petals and twisting, thin stems bending towards the ground as if badly engineered lined every waste path. They were a pretty flower, but without the grace of blooming earlier in the year, to me, they were blooms of ending. With this yearly wilting of the warmth, most children courted impending Halloween with its pandering for sweets and the wearing of thin, nylon costumes with plastic paint across their chests in letters proclaiming “Superman,” or “Cinderella.” The costumes were completed with cheap capes; cardboard, glitter-sprinkled crowns and plastic masks that often slipped down over our eyes. Breath condensation made a heavy sweat on the lip.
Running from home to home, rustling through the fallen leaves and smelling the acrid fragrance of burning jack-o-lantern lids never appealed to me. I ran with the other kids, knocked on doors because it was expected and I didn’t want mother talking to her friends on the phone again whining the words, “I don’t know what is wrong with her. She is so different from the others.” Sometimes I would catch mother looking at me with a puzzled eye. I learned quickly that to avoid being watched with that look I could mimic the children around me; so I played at liking Halloween, the death holiday that wedded the death of nature once a year.
I was ten years old when my inner observation melded with my outer life. I had decided long ago that children were hoodwinked into enjoying the loss of summer, this habitual serenade that death was a celebration when I felt it the frenzied human craze that historically had followed Black Plague into a castle…this human need to turn from the eventuality of demise especially when it was imminent; so like all of the Halloweens behind me initially I was not looking forward to my tenth one any more than the ones that preceded it.
It was the first year that mother did not buy me a nylon costume. She told me that this year I could make my own creation. I thought Halloween might be fun this time around. Not that the celebration had somehow lightened from its darkness, but I had a questing mind and piecing together fabric, pillows or whatever I could find around the farm to use as a disguise excited me.
I ended up dressed as a flower child. It was 1968. I played on the concept of “flower child,” and instead of long, straight hair, love beads and peace signs, I was a literal flower child. I picked the late-summer, spindly flowers and weeds from the pathways that criss-crossed the farm. I tucked and pinned them in my hair, up the sleeves of my jacket, tied them to my legs and taped them to a paper plate with eye holes cut into it.
We, in a group of costumed farm children of a variety of ages, headed out for our night of candy gathering. I realized on some level that the farmers and their wives got a tad of joy from seeing us at their front doors. It was a reprieve perhaps from the heaviness of farming, and I must admit on my 10th Halloween I had fun going to the neighbors’ houses and smiling through my paper plate mask as I told them with glee, “I am a flower child!
Eventually our motley collection of pillow cases and grocery bags, although far from full, grew heavy, and the younger children began to flag and yawn; so we headed back to our homes along the side of the road, kicking pebbles ahead of our feet. Smithy Weston, the oldest of our crew at age 13, tried to scare the rest of us by jumping every few feet and calling shrilly, “What was that?” He pulled my pig tail woven full of now wilted, wild flowers. When I jerked my head around and looked him in the eye, he shrugged his shoulders, made his eyes very big and said, “What?” Us older children kept the young ones ahead of us like we were herdsmen and they were our sheep. Just as we were coming up on Willow Bend (this particular bend in the road had a name of its own, because on the other side of the willows was our favorite swimming pond) Taylor Martin, the youngest of our Halloween group, five years old and having been in kindergarten for only a couple of months, danced out onto the road way, singing some thing he had learned in school about a pumpkin dance. He lifted his knees up high like he was marching, then turned around a couple of times. He shook his hands over his head and sang, “Pumpkins orange and round, Smiling without sound. Carved by children’s hands across these scary lands. Good night, Good night. To all this Halloween fright.” That is what I remember, but the song could have been something different. I do remember his little body turning in the shadowy night. If I close my eyes it dances there still.
The head lights came around Willow Bend without warning. There had been no dim beam of their approach or if it had existed we all failed to notice. Taylor disappeared without a cry as if a wizard had touched him with a magic wand. It is a flash of memory; the abrupt end of Taylor’s song, the blinding lights; the youngest disappearing under that brightness; hollow, double thumps; the screech of tires; the chorus of our children’s voices as if railing against the vulgarity of the moment. I noticed the davenport, pot belly stove and two, damp cardboard boxes in the bed of the pick-up truck as it pulled to the side of the road.
I saw little Taylor, seemingly even smaller than he had been before, spread out and untidy, his body half on and half off the road. His head was no longer round like a cantaloupe, but slightly misshapen, and his eyes stared off to the left. His neck twisted and his torso, arms and legs were in the opposite direction from his face. Both of his shoes had flown off his feet and his costume had ripped down the seam on one side. His mask was still around his neck where he had pushed it low while performing his pumpkin dance for us.
Ahead on the road, I could see smashed pumpkin pieces scattered where the teenagers of the neighboring farms had spiritedly dashed them. I thought I could still hear their laughter in the woods. I saw a boy in a skeleton costume holding a little girl dressed as a witch very close. She was crying, her head buried in his plastic painted rib cage. They may have been the Carlson’s children. I don’t remember.
I looked back to Taylor’s lifeless body on the road where a dark stickiness was growing like a halo around his head. Then slowly I looked up to where the stars were cold pinpoints against the dark sky. My head tilted back as far as I could, not moving my eyes at all, I turned my body half way around until I found the lights of the big dipper. It was still there like neon dots on a wet and endless chalk-board.