Happy Halloween
(Dedicated to Birdie)
When I was in high school, I lived in a too-small house with my mother and father and too many brothers and sisters in the middle of the woods too far from anywhere. The house was on the far side of Elk Creek from the road, and the two sides were connected by a swinging footbridge suspended from cables. We had electricity, but no phones and no TV reception. We had dogs and cats and a nanny goat and an enormous hog that thought it was a goat, too.
I loved it.
To get to school we caught the school bus that took us ten miles to the grade school in Shady Cove. I waited for a second, larger bus that continued south, over the Russian River, another 15 miles to the high school in Eagle Point. The whole trip took about an hour, which gave me plenty of time to do the homework I had put off the night before.
My best friend Tom lived with his mom and dad and three younger sisters in a hand-built house about ten minutes out of Eagle Point. Because I lived so far away, and because Tom's family were among the warmest people on earth, I frequently spent the night at his house. They had 15 acres of gently sloping scrub oak and pines, a little creek running through the middle and a small pond. They raised sheep and pigs and chickens, and a half dozen of the meanest geese you've ever seen.
Tom was an amateur herpetologist. In a small room in the barn he had a dozen or so glass-fronted cages that housed the many snakes and lizards he caught locally and sold, by mail, to zoos and collectors all over the country.
A couple of years before I met him, Tom's house burned to the ground on Christmas Eve while he and his family were in town. While they looked over the charred wreckage of their lives on Christmas Day, a line of cars and trucks made its way up the narrow road to the property. Most of the entire population of Eagle Point turned out with lumber and saws and hammers, and in the course of three days, they built a simple, but substantial house for the displaced family. They brought food and clothes, furniture - and a Christmas tree.
By the time I met Tom's family they had added a long wing onto the main house, a hallway with windows on one side and a series of four small bedrooms opposite. Tom's room was the second, just wide enough for two single beds. This is where I slept when I spent the night.
Tom's family was garrulous and rhythmic: their domestic lives tended to evolve in two-week cycles. Tom's dad, Eudy - short for Eustice - drove his motorcycle to Medford every day, where he worked for the railroad. He was paid on the tenth and 25th of every month, and on pay day, he and Tom's mother drove the station wagon into town and bought two weeks' worth of groceries. That night was always hamburger night. The diet was rich and varied, often supplemented with provisions from their own small farm, over the next two weeks. On the night before the next pay day they had a big pot of beans.
They used spoons for everything - I don't think there was a fork in the house - and the family beverage of choice was water, fresh and cold from the well, served up in Mason jars. After dinner, Eudy would sit at their old upright piano and play Molly Malone and Grandfather's Clock while the rest of us sang along.
Tom's older sister Mary lived with her husband and two young daughters in Medford. She was a vivacious and lovely young woman who laughed easily and was devoted to her extended family. She was one of those people - my mother was another - who had some sort of electrical or magnetic field about them that caused wristwatches to stop after being worn for a few minutes. She was highly regarded locally for her ability to divine the location of water by the use of a forked stick. A few years in the future, while chatting in her driveway with her husband and a neighbor, she would abruptly collapse and die on the spot, the victim of an aneurism.
It was a clear, cold moonlit Friday night in January, and I was spending the weekend at Tom's. Eudy had not been feeling well all week and did not eat dinner. He went to bed early. The rest of us, Tom and I, his three younger sisters and his mom, stayed up and played board games. Around eleven we all went to bed.
At around two o'clock, Tom's mother entered his room. "Tom, wake up. I think we need to take your father to the hospital."
We jumped up and dressed as fast as we could, and went into Tom's parents' room. Eudy was delerious, moaning and speaking unintelligibly. He was a big man, so it took all of us to get him out to the car. We left the two little girls in the care of their older sister and Tom quickly drove the ten miles to the hospital in Medford. At this hour there was little traffic.
At the ER Eudy was quickly diagnosed with a burst appendix, and was rushed to the operating room. The rest of us - Tom, his mother and I - went to the waiting room to try to occupy our exhausted minds with the magazines there - back issues of Outdoor Life and Reader's Digest. After a few minutes Tom's sister Mary rushed into the room.
"Mary!" Tom's mother exclaimed. "I should have called you. How did you find out?"
"I didn't find out," she replied. "What's wrong? Where's Dad?"
"He just went into the operating room - it's his appendix. How did you know we were here?"
"I don't know," Mary said. "I couldn't go to sleep. I was agitated and it seemed that something was wrong. I sat by the phone for a while, and then I just had an urge to come to the hospital, so here I am."
This didn't even seem strange to me, not tonight, not with this family. Mary picked up a magazine and waited with the rest of us. After about an hour, the doctor came out to talk with us.
"As you know," he said to Tom's mother, "your husband's appendix burst, and it was quite mess for us to clean up. But I'm confident we got everything. He's resting comfortably under sedation now, and probably won't wake up until later in the morning. You might as well go home and get some sleep."
Mary went home, and Tom drove his mother and me back to Eagle Point. Tom and I went to bed and quickly to sleep.
At about ten in the morning we all got up and had a quick breakfast before heading back to the hospital. Tom's dad was awake and we went in to visit him. He was his usual self, making wry jokes about the nurses and apologizing for getting us all out of bed in the middle of the night.
"I had a strange and vivid dream during the night," he said. "I woke up here in my hospital bed, sat up and then walked over to the window. I looked out at the still moonlit night for a while, then turned around. I was startled to see my body still asleep here in the bed. Then I felt a sense of peace, along with a desire to see my family. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, I floated through the closed window, and out into the night.
"I gently rose above the hospital until I could look down on all of Medford. I floated over to where I could see Mary and Bob's house. Everything was so beautiful in the moonlight, sparkliing and peacful. I began slowly floating north, up the Rogue Valley, over Eagle Point and on up the hill to our house. I could see the animals in the field, the cats asleep on the porch. I floated through the front door to the hall way, and into our room, Jean, and I saw you there, asleep in our bed. I wanted to touch you but knew I couldn't. I went back down the hall and looked in on Tom's room. I saw you, Tom, and Gary deep asleep. Then I went down and saw Jill, and the girls.
"I was standing there, it seemed, looking at them, wondering vaguely what I would do next, when I felt a sudden urgent calling: I had to get back to the hospital. I quickly flew through the walls and out of the house. I sped like a meteor back down the valley to the hospital, through my window, and into my body.
"And that's the end of the dream."
The hair was standing up on the back of my neck, and looking around I saw looks of wonder on all the other faces. Before anyone could respond, though, the doctor came bustling into the room.
"Okay," he said, "visiting time's over. We have some tests to do, and our patient needs some rest. Thank you all for coming."
As we all filed into the hall I recognized a nurse who was on duty the night before when we had first arrived. She recognized us, too.
"Excuse me," she said, addressing Tom's mother. "I just wanted to tell you how lucky your husband is. Some time in the night, after the surgery, his life suport monitors went off. We had to rush in to resuscitate him. He actually was dead for more than a minute, and we thought we had lost him. But he's a tough old bird with a very strong will. I think he's going to be fine."
We drove home in the silence of wonder.
3:52:45 PM 
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