One Halloween, when I was 10 years old, Mom made me make a queen costume out of an old, white bedsheet. We glued cotton balls to the edges of the sheet to make it look like a royal robe. I tied it around my neck and cut a glittering crown out of yellow construction paper that Mom stapled around my head.
My brother Mike and I had just finished carving jack-o’-lanterns. We scraped out thick slime from the pumpkin’s innards and flicked our fingers at each other to rid them of the gunk and pumpkin seeds. Then we stuck candles in each pumpkin, lit them on our parents’ porch, and set out with friends on our quest for neighborhood candy in our Cascade Valley, which is six miles from Moses Lake. Mike was dressed in a tattered hobo outfit, with mascara smeared on his “bearded” cheeks.
It was a dark, crisp October night. Lawns became spooky graveyards; straw-filled scarecrow corpses dangled from bare elm trees. Gossamer cobwebs with huge, black cloth spiders hung across doorways and tangled the tops of lilac bushes along our trek.
Spent candy wrappers swirled in the chilly breeze. They whispered of delicious treats to come, of handfuls of candies slid into our pillowcases: caramel Sugar Daddies, cherry-flavored Tootsie Pops and chewy Tootsie Rolls; chalky sugar Kings Candy Cigarettes; Pixie Sticks; Dad’s Root Beer Barrels; and Bazooka Bubble Gum wrapped in slick paper comics.
I giddily ate part of my loot as I tromped around the Valley because I knew my parents would raid our candy bags after we were secured in bed later that night. Of course, we couldn’t really eat all that, anyway, and I was definitely into sharing. But somehow having it taken from me after trudging around the Valley to get it seemed unfair, and because it was something Mom and Dad did so secretively.
The stars glinted and filled the autumn sky. The air was heavy with the aroma of fallen leaves, and the sweet odor of dead weeds along the dirt and gravel road. A light wind whorled around us, hinting of much colder days to come. I shivered inside my thin cotton sheet, white blouse, puffy snow pants and saddle shoes. Our chatter turned to the scary evening at hand: a spooky, sharp-toothed pumpkin on a doorstep; a creepy, bleach-boned plastic skeleton on a front porch; a leafless oak tree with bony fingers and toilet paper strips, scratching the sky.
Other children ran between cars parked alongside the asphalt road too: a mummy here, a witch there. Demons and vampires scampered and shrieked, oblivious to death’s meaning. We saw broken shards of pumpkins along the way.
There were no streetlights in Cascade Valley. Our little troupe carried flashlights. We crept up to a house with porch light beaming and spied a teenage boy standing by the front door, dressed in a sportscoat, white shirt and tie. It seemed out of place, but who were we to challenge his outfit?
He invited us in. Why we decided to file into that house, I don’t have a clue. We were just dumb kids. What a nightmare could have transpired on that Halloween night!
We entered a well-lit front room and saw twenty metal folding chairs set up, facing a church pulpit. We were told to sit down and did just that, not knowing what would happen to us if we resisted. Actually, I think we were pretty dense about it all and thought we were going to get candy. So we sat.
The boy’s father, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher, began a “hellfire and damnation” sermon. He told us Halloween was an evil, Satanic holiday. I remember he raised his outstretched hand, pointed his finger and shook it at the ceiling. He said Jesus would not approve of trick-or-treating and we were wicked children who needed to be saved.
How did we get ourselves involved in this? We left with Seventh-day Adventist brochures and ambled on for homemade caramel popcorn balls, candy corn and Milky Ways. And, I gorged myself before my father could get his sticky paws on my heavy bag of treats.
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