The Halloween Tree

In every alley and door and window were mounds of sugar skulls with beautiful names.

From

every alley came the tap-tap of deathwatch-beetle coffin makers nailing, hammering, tapping coffin lids like wooden drums in the night.

On every corner were stacks of newspapers with pictures of the Mayor and his body painted in like a skeleton, or the President and his body all bones, or the loveliest maiden dressed like a xylophone and Death playing a tune on her musical ribs.

"Calavera, Calavera, Calavera--" the song drifted down the hill. "See the politicians buried in the news. REST IN PEACE beneath their names. Such is fame!

"See the skeletons juggling, standing high

On each other's shoulders!

Preaching sermons, wrestling, playing soccer!

Little runners, little jumpers,

Little skeletons that leap about and fall.

Did you ever dream that death could be

Whittled down so very small?"

And the song was true. Wherever the boys looked were the miniature acrobats, trapeze performers, basketball players, priests, jugglers, tumblers, but all were skeletons hand to hand, bony shoulder to shoulder, and all small enough for you to carry in your fingers.

And over there in a window was a whole microscopic jazz band with a skeleton trumpeter and a skeleton drummer and a skeleton playing a tuba no bigger than a soup spoon and a skeleton conductor with a bright cap on his head and a baton in his hand, and tiny music pouring out of the tiny horns.

Never before had the boys seen so many--bones!

"Bones!" laughed everyone. "Oh, lovely bones!"

The song began to fade:

"Hold the dark holiday in your palms,

Bite it, swallow it and survive,

Come out the far black tunnel of el Dia de Muerte And be glad, ah so glad you are... alive!

Calavera...Calavera..."

The newspapers, bordered in black, blew away in white funerals on the wind.

The Mexican boys ran away up the hill to their families.

"Oh, strange funny strange," whispered Tom.

"What?" said Ralph at his elbow.

"Up in Illinois, we've forgotten what it's all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, tonight, heck, they're forgotten. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that's lonely. That's really sad. But here--why, shucks. It's both happy and sad. It's all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it's almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that's no mind, they're there. It's like holding hands at a seance with your friends, but some of the friends gone. Oh, heck, Ralph."

"Yeah," said Ralph, nodding behind his mask. "Heck."

"Look, oh, look, look there," said J.J.

The boys looked.

On top of a mound of white sugar skulls was one with the name PIPKIN on it.