Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Armed with a dull kitchen knife and a keen imagination (the wild horse was out of the chute now and good luck to the cowboy who’d try to break it or the rodeo clown who would distract it), I was projecting one heroic scenario after another onto the screen of my mind, reminding myself that I was born for adventure.

It was right about then that Mother returned to announce that the car had started up and driven away. “Maybe they’ll come back,” I said. Judging from the scowl on Mother’s face, she was all too aware of the note of hope in my voice.

Though she never said as much, our intruders probably had been young townspeople in immediate need of a secluded spot to swallow alcoholic libations, each other’s saliva, or both. It would be a few years before I learned that illicit drinking and making out were also adventures of a sort, ones for which I had alarmingly more aptitude than for the thwarting of Japanese spies.

One Halloween midnight when my father was in his early twenties, he and some buddies went to the home of a slightly older, recently married friend, quietly dismantled the fellow’s new Model T Ford, climbed up and reassembled it piece by piece on the roof of the house. (Cars were not so complicated in those days, but it was still quite a feat.)

The following morning, as the distraught groom was telephoning the Blowing Rock police to report a grand theft auto, a wildly gesticulating neighbor rapped on the window and beckoned him outside. As the men stared up at the shiny black vehicle, perched now like Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmare between two chimneys, they could only shake their heads and mutter, “Halloween.”

If in their voices there was consternation, there was also resignation and even a poorly disguised trill of admiration: it had been a daring, perfectly executed whopper of a prank on a night consigned to pranksters, a night ruled by the Lord of Misrule, a night when unsettled spirits of the dead squeezed through a crack in the space-time continuum, demanding notice and a bit of mischievous fun, often temporarily occupying the all-too-willing bodies of young Western males.

Nowadays it’s Halloween lite, all treats and no tricks, the dead driven back into the underworld by candy companies, liquor stores, Hallmark-card sellers, costume merchants, and understandably concerned owners of vulnerable private properties. Believe me, I’m seldom one to pine for the “good old days,” but when I was growing up much mischief was afoot on October 31, and ol’ Jack was alive in the lantern. Privies would be overturned, gates unhinged, penned chickens liberated, tires deflated, doorbells mysteriously rung, lawn shrubbery festooned with toilet paper, homes pelted with eggs; and every shop window in town thickly soaped, generally with pseudocryptic graffiti resembling today’s adolescent “tags.”

With long roots in antiquity and the human psyche, Halloween was the one night of the year when humanity openly acknowledged universal dread, honoring the departed even as it trembled at the rattle, real or imagined, of their bones; a celebration in which populations came together to sing “Happy Birthday to Death.” A Halloween without fear is a Christmas without cheer, an Independence Day without freedom, a luau without aloha, a corrida without olé .

By the twentieth century, the old terror, if not erased, had been significantly suppressed; and once-sanctioned communal anarchy reduced to a temporary tolerance of the kind of soft vandalism previously described. And in century 21, the Feast of the Dead is primarily represented by tutu-clad children on tooth-decay missions, by young adults dressed up as cultural icons in the hope they won’t be recognized when they make inappropriate sexual advances and/or get falling-down drunk.

Now, as a property owner, not to mention “senior citizen” (talk about a scary epithet), I can’t say I’d prefer those Halloweens of yore, yet I can’t help but feel that something has been lost: something transformative, something central to our story, something secretly nourishing to the soul. And, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind awakening one November 1 to see my neighbor’s Toyota on top of his house.

As a teenager in Warsaw (the Virginia village where I finally got over my homesickness for Blowing Rock), I was to be found every Halloween among the group of boys that gathered after supper in the center of town, intent on mischief, percolating with an unconscious longing to invoke and flirt with those fearsome forces that haunt the mortal shadows of being. On the other hand, it may just have been a bunch of bored kids looking for a break in small-town routine, looking to cut loose for a night, looking for a little excitement, for kicks. Despite their rowdy nature, these rallies were fundamentally devoid of malice, were reflective of an actual kind of innocence; yet, as I can report firsthand, they did not always produce a happy ending.

As we boys, armed with bars of soap and rolls of bathroom tissue, milled about Warsaw’s main intersection, waiting for Clanton’s Drug Store to douse its lights and close for the night (the intersection’s other businesses had gone dark at six), we were inevitably joined — or, rather, confronted — by an adult male in a suit and tie. That would have been Mr. Willy Jones, the commonwealth attorney for Richmond County, a jowly, humorless middle-aged man whose fairly affluent residence was a scant two blocks away. Jones would puff himself up, survey us disdainfully, and address us in a painfully slow Southern accent so swimming in hog gravy that it elicited giggles from us boys, even though all spoke fluent Dixie save I, who, as aforementioned, sounded like an Oklahoma bug doctor trapped under a spud truck. “I am orderin’ y’all,” Willy Jones would announce, “to deesperse this assembly immediately or I will prosecute ever lass one of y’all to the fullest extent of the law.”

Jones’s threat would be greeted with hoots and jeers. He would then repeat it, emphasizing the prosecute part; and gradually, in pairs or groups of three or four, boys would peel away from the main body, only to regroup (though we always lost several ’fraidy cats) around the corner and down the street in front of the B&B poolroom, the only establishment in town aside from the movie theater and the Negro-friendly Texaco station to remain open after eight. It was a yearly ritual: Willy Jones would strike a vocal blow for the rule of law and the forces of good, then we frankly laughable representatives of the Dark Side would scatter, later to slip and sneak around the residential streets banging on doors, tipping over garbage cans, wreaking very minor havoc. One October 31, however — it was my senior year in high school — the routine took an unfortunate left turn, paving the way for the end of Halloween Fright and the advent of Halloween Lite in Warsaw forever.

Wishing perhaps to put some distance between ourselves and Willy Jones (Warsaw’s sole cop always seemed to conveniently vanish at Halloween), eight or nine of us found ourselves a half mile or so from the heart of town, out where residences petered out and croplands began. Be it by chance or subliminal design, we were gazing across a field at a large white farmhouse occupied by an unmarried schoolteacher and her bachelor brother. Andrew Garland, a gruff old bird, had retired from surveying to devote all of his time to the farm. His sister, Claude, a severe, stout woman who had been teaching typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping at Warsaw High School since practically the demise of clay tablets, was known to everyone, young and old, as “Miss Claude.”

Motivated by no spoken plan, we advanced to within forty feet of Chez Garland, finally pausing beneath a black walnut tree, very tall and likely older than all of us put together. The actual black walnut nut, hard and dense of shell, is contained inside a thick, pulpy husk about the size of a handball: a perfect size, alas, for throwing. As there were walnuts aplenty on the ground, it wasn’t long before, silently, spontaneously, our puppet strings pulled perhaps by the spirits of Halloween — ancient, autumnal, arboreal — we commenced to hurl the walnuts against the side of the house.