by Eric Vanderwall
The Halloweens of those early years blend together and it seems as if it was one long night, and, as it seemed to my young boy’s mind, the whole world joined in, that world being our neighborhood. It was a long Halloween night, both wet and dry, both cold and mild, filled with expectation and disappointment, all condensed into pointillist moments that, out of the blackness of the forgotten, have, many years later, been brought forth to light. The days of October that preceded Halloween have all faded away, leaving only those few impressions of the month’s final night to encapsulate the entirety. Had I known in those early years how precious those times were and how irrevocably it would all be lost, I would have paid better attention. I would have tried to remember everything. Although nearly all those Septembers and Octobers have disintegrated, one memory of the second day after Halloween, All Souls’ Day, remains.
Our father had us that year for Halloween, which was a Friday. On Sunday, the second day of the new month and our last day with him for two weeks, he woke us early and we drove out of town in the truck. My little brother sat up front with our father and I sat by myself in the back, on the right. I could see the side of our father’s face, looking ahead as he drove, and the back of my brother’s head when he leaned against the door. I watched his little hand fiddling with the door lock or tracing patterns on the window.
The day was cold and crisp, the ground dry, the sky cloudless. We drove east, out of the suburbs and into the countryside, where the leaves were yellow and red and gold. We went through an old covered bridge to cross a river. As we always did when driving through these dark spaces, my brother and I held our breath. Without saying so, we knew we would continue holding our breath to make a contest of it. He pretended to hold his much longer, but I knew that he had been breathing all along.
The road wound through a sparse wood of bare trees and came to another bridge, a narrow one with only one lane. I looked out the window to the river far below. It was shallow and the current fast, swirling and eddying around rocks. Our father explained that the source of this river was in the distant mountains on our right, and that it flowed to the covered bridge we had crossed earlier and on to join the big river near our home. On the other side of the bridge the road ran straight through fields of dry and broken stalks, the stubble remaining after the harvest.
We came to a small town with a wide and empty main street. After passing the blinking traffic signal and the train tracks that cut through the middle of everything, we turned onto a side street and wended our way into the driveway of a one-story house. Our father, my brother, and I got out and two men came out of the house. One of them had a brown moustache. They looked like brothers, but didn’t introduce themselves as such. They took us to the side of the house and removed a blue tarp from a pile of chopped wood. We began loading it in the back of the truck. The roughhewn wood poked my bare hands and forearms and left bits of bark and splinters on my t-shirt. It was cold and our breath was visible. I wanted to talk to my little brother, to make jokes, as we passed each other going to and fro, but he seemed not to be looking at me. Maybe we had been told to be quiet.
I thought about that light that kept blinking even when nobody was looking, how quickly Halloween had ended, how we were now in November with the festive mystery and costuming behind us. The candy was still there waiting for us, but the day around which the month revolved was gone and we were heading straight into winter. At my age, I feel winter coming on as early as Labor Day, but back then the cold still felt far off in the early days of November. There was plenty of time.
We must have eventually finished loading the firewood. In the truck I again sat behind my brother and our father drove. The wood in the back shifted with each of the truck’s turns. We drove back along the same route, seeing the same road and the same dry land from the other direction.
Our father looked straight ahead and drove without speaking. My brother’s arm rested on the door and never moved. When we went through the covered bridges I held my breath, but I couldn’t tell if my brother did or not. They both seemed so far away.
© Eric Vanderwall
Eric is a writer, editor, and musician. His work has previously appeared in Memoryhouse, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, The Ekphrastic Review, the Star Tribune, and elsewhere. Find out more on his website www.ericvanderwall.com.
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