Old School Halloween

     For years, I've been trying to knock out the sequel of GODS OF OUR FATHERS, entitled BLUE BLOOD. I might have posted this last year but, since the book takes place in the fall of 1857, there was a scene I'd written that takes place on Halloween. It was the result of much research that I'd done into how All Hallows Eve was celebrated in the mid 19th century. You'll see some things that remain familiar and have been preserved by posterity and other traditions that have been forgotten. It's narrated by the protagonist, Vesey Van Zant.

18

(Liverpool Street, East Boston, October 31^st 1857)

In Boston, Hallowe’en, or All Hallows Eve, is both a new and an ancient holiday. It was hardly observed in the New World except in heavily Gaelic neighborhoods until the Irish began fleeing in droves from the Potato Famine in the mid ‘40’s. Along with their families, meager possessions, tattered clothes and equally tattered dreams, they imported to our shores their traditions and Hallowe’en was one of them.

     Unlike Christmas and Thanksgiving, which are already entrenched Christian and American holidays, All Hallows Eve has roots in Ireland’s and Great Britain’s misty pagan past. Part mysticism, part heathen ritual, I suspect it had been jealously coopted by the Christian faiths in order to steal from Hallowe’en its pagan thunder. As it is a new holiday that has been almost entirely given over to small children to celebrate, I knew precious little about it until tonight at O’Riordan’s house on Liverpool Street in East Boston.

     My colleague’s home was an ambulatory tableaux straight out of Mr. Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, only with garish costumes, apples in a tub of water and large rutabagas carved out into humanoid faces and lit from within by candles or votives. It was quite a festive atmosphere considering O’Riordan, Mary and Jimmy made their domicile just two streets north of where poor Zeke had been shot in the head nearly a fortnight ago. Adding to the macabre nature of this nascent holiday was the fact we were joined by a convicted killer in the person of Barney McGinniskin and an unconvicted one in Nate Revere.

     Revere could not have been more of an imperfect man with whom to spend a holiday no matter how frivolous. He was here to potentially provide security should our charge get it into his devious head to try to flee but that seemed to be an unnecessary injunction. As fortune would have it, McGinniskin and Mary (Dunleavy) O’Riordan happened to be from neighboring villages in County Cork and well knew the traditions that make up this strange new holiday. In fact, Mary seemed perfectly taken by Barney’s charm as was little Jimmy, now a strapping lad of 10.

     Mary had by this time performed the divination ritual of her native Ireland, prayers to faeries or spirits pronounced ee shee or some such moniker. On the face of it, she appeared to be praying until O’Riordan, himself no novice to pagan rituals, informed me she was speaking Gaelic and invoking the spirits who could cross over to our realm as, according to the theory or superstition, the membrane betwixt ours and theirs was at its thinnest.

     Of course, McGinniskin completely understood this ritual, having been born not ten miles from Mary’s village, and in turn seemed utterly captivated by Brendan’s pregnant wife. The more somber celebration of Hallowe’en now out of the way, it was time for food, drink and games. O’Riordan had positioned a tub in the kitchen filled with ice cold well water and apples. Revere seemed completely bemused by the sight of his brother in arms, stepson and several of Jimmy’s friends submerging their faces into the frigid water to remove from the zinc wash basin the elusive apples with but their teeth.

     Brendan proved to be the only one adept at it and the boys had to settle for prosaically extracting apples with their hands. Water streamed in a rivulet from O’Riordan’s beard as he shook his soaked head like a dog just come in from the rain, the bright red fruit still caught in his gleaming white teeth.

     “Congratulations, O’Riordan,” Revere sourly said, “you and your outsized mouth just hit upon the most inefficient way possible to harvest apples. Cheers,” he concluded by raising his glass of Bushmill’s in a mock toast.

     “It can ‘ardly be said I ‘ave just hit upon it,” O’Riordan replied, drying his face with a towel. “Snap Apple Night’s roots go back at least a century or two.”

     He then looked out the window, perhaps a concession to any lingering superstitions he may have had about the food offerings left outside by Jimmy and Mary for the faeries. He grunted a chuckle as he withdrew from the window, perhaps on discovering the treats had been taken by costumed children a’guising.