All of my family was with me, no possible way anyone at the table had made it happen. I was not so stupid as to at least wonder. “A whole bonfire this time,” I shouted. As always we flew to the front door. The proper visitor was on the walkway, and we tore upstairs, our old friends there on the roof.
The following year I had to learn—it was necessary to be told—that William had climbed out of my father’s office window and lit the perfectly appointed woodpile. He’d lit the pumpkins, too, before he’d slipped back into the house. The fire hadn’t roared up until he’d been peaceably eating his dinner. I would have been glad to pretend not to know, everyone forever doing the trick to amuse Mary Frances, but that year I was called into service.
My grandmother was dying up in St. Paul. She had been in a locked ward for a few years, a little lady in her own room with a swivel table over the bed for mealtimes. For the most part we didn’t listen to the bulletins of her suffering. Finally, my father got the call and he had to break away from the harvest to drive to Minnesota. Only a catastrophe could get him out of an apple tree. He arrived and an hour later Athena Hubert Lombard died. “Very peacefully,” he told my mother on the phone, so that she said, “Oh, Jim, I’m glad.” We had seen the ram on its back kicking and kicking right before he died, when the shearer had nicked his artery, so we knew what she meant.
When he returned it was Halloween night. He was almost too tired to eat, my mother sitting close by, pointing out what was most delicious.
She had instructed us to do the work of the evening. The pumpkin visitors, she claimed, would cheer him up. Even though it was Grandmother’s time, even though she’d died in her sleep, he still would need the comfort of tradition. We understood the importance of doing it perfectly. While my mother went on speaking quietly to my father William and I stole outside. The barn cats were like minnows in the shallows, moving around our legs as we carried the visitors from the bushes and went pumpkin to pumpkin, lighting the candles. Once the faces were illuminated even the big-headed torn-up toms crouched low, frightened and full of respect.
When my father at last turned to see the toothless beauty in the kitchen window he did something that surprised us. All of him right there at the table seemed to dissolve. My mother didn’t shush him or say that soon he’d feel better. Together they huddled in his wide old chair, both of them weeping. There was no comfort—we could see this, none to be had—and so we crept away to our room and into our bunks. We cried not for our grandmother, a woman so ancient she didn’t know us. We were crying because the visitors, for the first time in their long history, had failed to bring happiness. We had done the work wrong, or it wasn’t for us to do, or their powers were over and done? Somehow, we had made a mistake.
Later, my father came upstairs to tell us how much he loved the magic. He said he couldn’t have imagined a better homecoming, and if Grandma were still with us—plus, he meant, still had her mind—she would have enjoyed the story. It was a nice try. We appreciated his effort but we knew that the pumpkin visitors would never come again.
It must have been the next Halloween when Stephen was more or less living with Gloria. Again my mother was the one who made the suggestion about the visitors. Why didn’t William and I make them appear at the cottage? We promptly forgot about the disaster of the previous year, all of a sudden excited and serious. With utmost care we picked out several pumpkins from our private patch. There was the carving to do, the four of us working together at the table, the great emptying to make the creatures live, the wet pulp in mounds on the newspaper.