Halloween’s coming.
There have been a lot of
great Halloweens for me over the years, some that involved ketchup-as-blood,
some that involved neighbors who would make us all fresh donuts while we
trick-or-treated, some where the snow on the ground was higher than our knees, and
even one or two that involved the police.
Okay, once even the state police … with riot gear … and dogs.
There’s one Halloween
image that haunts me, though. It was the
Halloween when the Civil War statue was set on fire.
I was driving with my
grandfather, he steering and me sitting unbuckled in the passenger seat. I don’t know why we were coming through the
village square since my grandparents’ house and our house connected via several
back roads that didn’t involve the center.
Even calling it “a center” seems overly generous since it had one tiny
store that would open whenever it felt like it, a small but artful library, and
a fire station that was run by volunteers who sounded coded alarms to alert
firefighters to street addresses in distress.
Maybe we drove through the
center of town assuming that less children would be in the streets trick-or-treating,
a smart move by my partially-blind grandfather.
No matter the reason, the timing of it all still stays with me decades
later.
There were two grassy
areas in the village square: the park, surrounded by aging white fence posts
and old-fashioned stone posts with metal rings for tying up horses; and the
small triangle of grass in front of the old Brick School. The park was full of tress and had a sidewalk
running through it, and I can still remember riding my bicycle straight
through, full-tilt, holding an open bottle of Orange Crush soda. A few years later my friends and classmates
would film a Cheerios commercial in that exact spot in the pouring rain.
The village green in front
of the Brick School (that’s what we all called it – whether or not it was the
official name, we never knew otherwise) had a bush or two, maybe even a few
trees, but its main attraction was the Civil War statue. The bronze statue, created in 1869, was the
first soldier statue ever erected in the state of New Hampshire, and this
information I just discovered (though I wish I’d known it all those years
ago). The infantryman statue stood guard
over the village green, and we’d often climbed its granite base, picnicked in
its shadow, and ridden our bikes in circles around it without paying the
soldier too much attention except knowing that he was there. Always there.
Always the same. Sometimes he had
snow on his kepi, but usually he quietly kept watch with an occasional bird on
his shoulder.
This particular Halloween
night, though, the infantryman was on fire.
I still to this day don’t
know how or why they did it, but teenagers had managed to set the statue’s head
aflame. My grandfather reasoned that
they probably doused him in kerosene or something. After all, bronze doesn’t just spontaneously
combust. It was so dark that night,
too. I don’t remember anything except
coming up the small hill and seeing black sky and orange flame engulfing the
Civil War soldier’s head and shoulders.
The rest of him remained standing at attention, never touched by the
torching.
It is the singular
Halloween image that conjures goosebumps on my skin when I think of it. Not the other Halloweens, not even the one
with the state police (though that was a doozey, if I do say so), none of them
stays with me the way that one moment in time has stayed with me.
I remember clutching a bag
full of candy on my lap, and I think I had my plastic mask resting on my
head. I was transfixed and horrified and
fascinated and terrified, all at the same time, all sentiments perfect for such
a spooky holiday.
“Why?” I remember asking.
My grandfather kept his
eyes on the road, never slowing, never considering stopping to watch or
investigate. He simply answered, “Because
it’s Halloween.”
