A North Idaho Halloween

 

October 18, 2009

 

Herbie Getts was a couple of years older than Norm Nelson, Vern Schulze and me. Our little group was about 10 on the Halloween night of which I am thinking. The major difference between us and Herbie was that we considered Halloween to be a single night. Herbie regarded it as a season.

 

Long before our little Halloween outing for treats, Herbie started raiding the homes along our stretch of the highway. He didn’t bother with treats but went directly to tricks. He was a purely destructive force. Outhouses were toppled, car windows waxed over, mailboxes torn off their posts, gates sabotaged. As the three of us set out on our Halloween night of trick-or-treating, Norm, Vern, and I had no inkling of the rage Herbie had aroused among the neighbors.

 

In the unlikelihood homeowners would fail to give us a treat, we planned to play a mean trick on them, putting a little squiggle of soap on one of their windows. We laughed uproariously over this brazen fiendishness. At the McWilliams, the home of a gruff, busy logger, we trooped up onto the porch and bravely knocked. No response. We waited, then knocked again. Already starting to draw our bars of soap, we suddenly heard the backdoor of the house open and close quietly. Someone was trying to sneak up on us! Norm and I cleared a picket fence like two gazelles and streaked off into the darkness. Vern, for some unknown reason, crouched down to hide behind a tree no more than three-feet tall.

 

McWilliams caught him, of course. The sound of a gruff, angry voice, no doubt yelling at some quivering object crouched down behind a tree, drifted out to us. Norm and I were still picking up speed, so it was difficult to know what was being said. Both of us figured that was the end of Vern. Since he was our leader, we were momentarily confused as to how to proceed with our trick-or-treating.

 

Presently, Vern caught up with us. He had managed to persuade Mr. McWilliams, that he was innocent of all previous mischief, part of which had consisted of toppling the McWilliams’ outhouse. The toppling of the privy apparently required considerable strength, it being occupied by Mr. McWilliams at the time. Herbie said later that he understood it had been accomplished by means of a pry pole and a block of firewood used as a fulcrum, but he couldn’t be positive about the facts, because he had only heard them second hand.

 

Herbie had been extremely clever in covering his tracks. For one thing, someone had slipped into the Getts’ garage and waxed Mr. Getts’ car windows so thoroughly he was unable to drive to work the next morning. We heard about this from Herbie himself. He had seemed pleased at our amazement over the viciousness of the deed. Mr. Getts, being no fool, suspected Herbie, as we found out later, but he had no proof. As it turned out, Mr. Getts wasn’t the kind of person who needed proof, and Herbie ultimately paid a penalty of some sort.

 

On the night of our Halloween, however, the folks living along the highway were on the alert for any tricksters that might come their way. At one place, a big dog began to bark and tug at his chain as we approached along the driveway. The door of the house opened. We dived into a field of weeds. A man came out on the porch carrying a shotgun. His wife emerged and stood next to him. She played the beam of a flashlight over the weeds as we flattened our bodies into the Earth.

 

“You see anything, Pa?” The wife said.

 

“Nope. There’s something out there, all right. If it’s them Halloween tricksters, they’s probably smart enough not to fool around here.”

 

He was right about that.

 

Vern, Norm and I headed home, without a single treat in our little treat bags, at least none that I can recall.

 

We did one trick that night. On our way home, we decided to play a joke on a farmer who was notorious for being lazy. We thought we would cause him some work. So we hauled a number of large rocks and placed them in his driveway in such a fashion that he would have to get out of his car and move them. As we were going by on the school bus next morning, we saw him steer in and out around the rocks without touching a single one! It was a major disappointment. Those rocks, in fact, remained in his driveway for years afterwards.

 

Every Halloween I think back to that night so many years ago, the night we put the rocks in the farmer’s driveway. One Halloween during a book tour I was staying at a hotel in a large American city. As I recall, the local citizens referred to Halloween as Devil’s Night or some such thing. I couldn’t get dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, because all the tables had been reserved. The restaurant provided the diners with a wonderful vantage point to watch the fireworks — namely, the local pranksters setting fire to buildings! “Ooohh! Look at that one!”

 

I watched the fireworks display on TV in my hotel room. (Mostly, I wanted to make sure I didn’t see my hotel featured.) Here all these years I had felt bad about putting those rocks in the farmer’s driveway, even though they hadn’t seemed to bother him all that much. After watching Devil’s Night, I didn’t feel bad anymore.