Halloween came, and I was going as a hobo. I had learned from channel six that you could make your very own beard, even if you were a girl, by putting some of your mother’s cold cream on your face and then rubbing some coffee grounds on top of that. I put on one of Daddy’s old shirts and some overalls, grabbed a stick and tied a dishtowel around the end of it, and, with the help of channel six’s beard idea, I was a hobo. In Azalea Heights you could just take off on Halloween and be safe because everybody in town knew you and your parents and were watching out for you. There were even some widow-ladies that would invite you in and give you popcorn balls or candy apples to eat in front of their fireplaces.
But somebody wasn’t watching the post office on Halloween night when I was in fifth grade. They should have been, too, because Carla Nations and I had been planning for a month the idea that we would pull up all the signs on the post office lawn. I don’t know why, but this seemed like a spectacular idea to us both, so we set out in the darkness to do it. The only trouble was that it was just so easy, and then we were finished. The thrill of it that we had anticipated for so many weeks hadn’t materialized, and the whole affair seemed pretty anticlimactic, so we picked up all the signs and climbed on top of the postal delivery trucks and stuck the signs up there. I sure am glad there was a heavy dew that night because if the signs had not fallen off before the men came in to drive the trucks the next morning, somebody could really have gotten hurt… and it would have all been just because me and Carla Nations, of Azalea Heights Elementary School, got bored.
It makes you wonder how many times terrible things have happened to people just out of somebody else’s misguided prescription for boredom. It also makes you wonder why our consciences didn’t kick in before we left the post office and even worse, what was making them malfunction for that whole year. I’ll bet God had to do a lot of intervening that He hadn’t planned on that year — like causing dew to fall heavily at the Azalea Heights post office on Halloween night.
Since before we made it to the post office, we had gone to the exhibit hall at the fairgrounds to bob for apples and do the cakewalk, it was getting pretty late by the time we finished our sign caper, so Carla and I had to part ways and hurry home. I was further away than I allowed for and realized I needed to run or be late, which would not have been a good thing for my future possibilities of playing football in the dark with Jeremiah, Bubba, and Johnny Paul, so I took a shortcut through a block full of neighbor’s backyard. I was running full speed in the blackness right behind Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hughes’s house when suddenly a guide wire caught me by the mouth and turned me a complete back flip. I landed hard on my back, and for a minute, I thought I was a toothless, dead hobo until I felt the warm flow of blood running all down into my coffee-ground, cold cream beard. Bawling like a kindergartner, I limped the rest of the way home to find my parents with a den full of friends playing "42" and apparently not even thinking about whether I was going to come flying through the door at the last minute before my coach turned into a pumpkin.
Mother and Daddy washed off my beard, found the source of the cascading blood, and as always when I would get a gash somewhere that needed stitches, sent me to lie down in the bathtub until the bleeding stopped. They had learned quite a few years earlier, after I had jumped off the house onto my trampoline and busted it and my head on Christmas morning and later turned a back flip off the diving board while not standing close enough to the end of the board, that taking me for stitches was going to be entirely too expensive and that the we way we would handle these things from now on was just to let me bleed it out in the bathtub.
I thought that night on Halloween that maybe I had finally gotten banged up bad enough to deserve a trip to get stitches, but I was wrong.
