A Tale from the Hills (5 page)

Before the students left school on that Friday afternoon before Halloween, the essays and drawings were given to Mrs. Boatwright for judging. A box was placed beside of her office door for each category of entries. Alice felt proud as she dropped her drawing into the box. She showed artistic ability at the tender age of seven. A promising career might very well be in her future. William was proud of his drawing as well, but his ability was limited in comparison to his sister. He watched her work and he was in awe of her talent.

All the way home Alice and William laughed and talked and sang songs that they had learned at school. Alice was excited about coming back to school on Monday and finding out the results of the contest. She and William would play school all weekend to make the time go faster. In their little world everything was close to perfect. An invisible bubble surrounded and protected them. The older brothers followed behind them, but never as far as to be out of their sight. After all they had things to talk about too. The boys in their class were always talking about girls and how pretty Miss Coalson was. Even boys in the highest grade talked about her. When Alan heard one of them say that he would like to put his rod into her, he thought that the boy was talking about a fishing pole. Of course it becameapparent as the conversation progressed that the boy meant something else altogether.

Saturday morning the sound of heavy rain beating on the old tin roof of the Hill’s tiny house, lulled the children to sleep hours longer than usual. By the time the younger kids awoke, it was almost the middle of the day. They played quietly by the light of the old wood burning stove while their brothers kept dreaming. Their daddy had been out getting supplies the night before, and he was asleep on the tiny cot in the backroom. He slept close to the old cook stove that had been in the house since the early days of the railroad. The railroad company built all of the tiny houses in order to supply housing for railroad personnel. The employee living in each house was responsible for the maintenance of the track from his house to the next one down the line. The idea was abandoned when the danger of Indian reprisals passed. All of the little houses still belonged to the railroad, so the people living in them were squatters with no legal rights. Every year or so a representative from headquarters would inspect the tracks, but he never bothered to inspect any of the decrepit houses.

By the time that the older boys finally got out of bed, their daddy had prepared bread and cooked some late harvest apples, that were picked from a tree down the tracks. Everyone was hungry and the aroma was tantalizing. the rain continued to be heavy outside, just as the night before. Tom was concerned that the stream would be flooding out of its banks. The footbridge that the children crossed was well above the stream, but it was old and some of its wood was in need of replacement.

Suddenly there was a brilliant flash of lightning, followed almost instantly by a loud clap of thunder. It was unusual to have powerful thunderstorms this late in the season. Tom had always heard that thunderstorms in late October were a bad omen. He brushed the thought from his mind. The rain was falling in sheets now, but the kids were too busy eating to notice.

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The last thing that Carl said to the other three boys on that Friday afternoon at the schoolyard, was that they would meet later that same night. He figured that old lady Boatwright probably realized that they were up to something. She should have known that she could not keep them apart after they left the school grounds. The other boys were going to meet him at his family’s barn shortly after dark.

Sam showed up first, and Jay and James came in together. When Sam entered the barn from the side door, he told Carl that it was raining like a son of a bitch. Jay and James were cursing too, and bickering with each other, just as brothers sometimes do. The four of them had been planning Halloween tricks for three months now. Rain was not going to dampen their spirits. Hell, Sam thought to himself, it might even make everything better.

The boys started stealing eggs, a few at a time, and catching rats and snakes in the early part of August. They even caught six opossums and a baby raccoon. Carl created a secret room in the old barn by using bales of hay, and their temporary menagerie was completely hidden there. The boys had been very careful to keep their secret. Since Halloween fell on a Monday this year, they had all weekend to play tricks on the community.

Carl’s eyes used to sparkle when he heard his daddy talk about the Halloweens of the past. Sam’s daddy was friends with Carl’s daddy back in those days, and there were two or three other boys too,….who knows what ever happened to them? Nothing was sacred to those boys on Halloween night. They chopped down trees across the mountain roads. They broke every single window in the old schoolhouse, and they turned over outhouses throughout the community. Their greatest pleasure was turning over the outhouse of their mean old school teacher, and she was in it at the time. Everyone used to laugh until they coughed and wheezed when they talked about that episode. Carl and Sam were chips off of the old block.

Since it was pouring rain like water out of a bucket, the boys kept their mean antics to a minimum on that Friday night. They divided the six opossums among the group. Carl kept two, Sam got two, and the brothers got the last two. Carl decided to keep the baby raccoon, because it reminded him of a bandit that he saw in a movie at the Abingdon movie house. Each boy would choose the winners of their own version of a Halloween contest. The winners did not know that there was a contest until they received their prize, which was a freshly fattened opossum in their mailbox. Carl wanted Mrs. Boatwright to receive one of his prizes, but it was raining much too hard and she lived too far away. Each of the boys wanted to give Miss Coalson a prize, but that was a different game altogether. The group scattered and agreed to meet again on Sunday night.

Jay and James chose one of their neighbors, Mrs. Smith, to receive a fat opossum. The boys had fed the animals and played with them for three months, so they were almost as tame as cats. When the widow Smith opened her mailbox on Saturday morning, a fat, smelly opossum almost rolled out onto her feet. It scared her so badly that she peed all over her silly self and the old opossum waddled off into the woods. The two boys were laughing so loudly that she heard them, but they ran away before she could find them. Carl and Sam did not join that particular prize patrol because they were too busy sleeping, hypnotized by the pouring rain.

On Sunday afternoon the rain finally stopped, but it would be days before the stream would get back to its normal size. Carl and the other boys would have a good night to play tricks. It was a couple of hours before the boys could start, so Carl went to the old barn to get things ready. He counted the jars that contained the snakes and rats, and there were many. He wished that they had more opossums, because they were a huge success. There were a variety of snakes. A couple of the black snakes were so huge that they almost filled gallon jars. There were also water snakes, and king snakes, and house pilots, and garner snakes. Oneof the jars containing garner snakes looked kind of suspicious. Sometimes those little rascals resembled copperheads, which were very poisonous. Carl was glad when Jay assured him that they really were garner snakes. Either way, each boy looked after his own jars, and those were Jay’s.

Carl almost forgot about the rotten eggs. There were dozens of them. To make sure that they were really nasty, the boys places them next to the roof of the barn. the hot September and early October Sun, beating down on the metal roof of the barn, would assure that the eggs would be quite rancid. Carl told the other boys to wear coats with big pockets that would hold lots of eggs and snakes. He put all of the rats into one container. They were going to put them to a very good use in the girl’s toilet. Carl hoped that Mrs. Boatwright would open the door to make a Halloween inspection, because twenty or more rats would be scampering about within the small confines of the privy.

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The Hill family went to bed early on Sunday night. Alice especially wanted to be up early on Monday morning. It would be Halloween and Mrs. Boatwright would announce the winners of the contest. Alice was a modest little girl but she was fairly confident of winning a prize for her drawing. William was sure that she would win first place.

Not very far up the tracks, the group led by Carl was about to start making their rounds. Each boy was almost twice his normal size because of the bulky clothing that the boys were wearing. They needed plenty of pockets to carry all of the Halloween tricks that they were about to deliver.

One of the huge black snakes was going into the school mailbox, the other one to the minister who visited the school on a regular basis. The school got one for obvious reasons. The minister got one because none of the boys liked him. He was always telling them to go to church, and he always acted like such a big sissy. Sam told the other boys that his brother told him that the minister wore women’s underwear. Carl asked Sam how it was that his brother knewso much about the minister, but Sam did not answer. Sam suspected that his brother wore women’s underwear too.

While the boys were at school they deposited the box full of rats into the girl’s toilet. They made sure that the seat’s lid was down so that none of the rats could escape. One thing for certain, either the snake, or the rats or both would scare the crap out of old lady Boatwright.

Back in August when the boys began gathering their creepy little zoo, they had big plans for its unsavory animals. Now that the opossums were gone, and the rats were distributed, the only things left were snakes and the rotten eggs. They had already thrown several of the eggs at houses, and toilets, and churches, and the school house, but there were still a lot of them left.

The snakes were aggravating because of all of the jars. Jay suggested that since they had so many pockets on their coats, why not put the snakes in them. Sam was a little bit squeamish about the idea, but he dared not let the other boys know. Reluctantly he went along with the group. The boys began dividing up the jars. Each boy tried to pick the same ones that they supplied to the project. Since they had kept track of the little monsters for the last three months, each boy pretty well recognized his snakes.

The boys did the best that they could to distribute the snakes and the rotten eggs in their pockets. Most of the jacket pockets had flaps which helped to keep the snakes inside. But regardless of flaps, the boys spent much of their time pushing the snakes back inside their pockets. As they walked down the dirt roads, and lanes, and railroad tracks of their community, some of the snakes were escaping into the darkness. But there was so many of them that it did not really matter.

Jay kept scratching his leg. It felt just like a briar was sticking him through his pants. He tried to ignore the sensation, but he kept on feeling the briar sticking him. In desperation he put his hand inside of his pocket to try and find the bothersome briar. It almost instantly stuck him in the finger. He emptied his pockets and out came two eggs andthree of the small garner snakes. He did not think anymore about it and the scratching sensation stopped.

The boys put the snakes in mailboxes, in buckets, window sills, flower boxes, and anywhere else that they could. They threw eggs at everything from road signs to cats and dogs. Cows and horses were bombarded too. When their rounds were almost over, they were approaching the footbridge below the railroad trestle. They broke eggs everywhere, making the old footbridge as slippery as wet glass. The snakes slithered away in every direction, with some of them falling into the treacherous water below the bridge. The Halloween outing was for all practical purposes, over. It was time to go home.

When the boys reached the old barn, they decided to get to school early on Monday morning. They would hide in the bushes behind the toilets to watch the excitement that was sure to take place. By the time that Jay and James got home, Jay’s leg was starting to burn and ache. He thought that the briar must have stuck him several times. His finger felt like a bee sting, and both his leg and his finger were swollen. He went to bed because he was so sleepy that he could hardly keep his eyes open.

Jay and James shared a bedroom. Several times during the night James heard Jay talking crazy shit in his sleep. Finally he told Jay to shut the Hell up. There were no other sounds or commotion for the rest of the night. The next morning James awoke first, as usual. He thought that his brother was being unusually quiet. He walked over to Jay’s bed and if he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the look on Jay’s face.

His pale blue face was swollen out of proportion and contorted as if he was about to scream. When their parents removed the covers from his dead body, they discovered ten or twelve snake bites on Jay’s leg. They did not even notice the bite on his finger.

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When Alice awoke on Monday morning, she was very happy and excited. She could hardly wait to get to school and find out the results of the Halloween contest. She slipped quietly out of bed, trying not to disturb her brothers. She had woken up especially early and from a wonderful dream. In her dream she was surrounded by beautiful angels and they were singing to her. Even though she did not remember her mother, she imagined that the angel standing closest to her and singing so softly was her own sainted mother. As she made her way outside to the dilapidated old toilet, she knew that today would be wonderful.

When Alice returned to the house, she washed her face and hands, and combed her fine dark hair. She decided that she would help her daddy with the morning rituals. It would soon be time to wake her brothers. Tom caught rain water on Friday night, and he and Alice had washed the family’s meager laundry Saturday evening. While Alice was putting on her fresh smelling dress, she decided that she would wear her new shoes today. She was so proud of them because she had never had new shoes before.