Free The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) by Mark Schweizer

dressed as their favorite biblical character. Of course, when the Witch of Endor and Lucifer showed up, they were both invited home to change into something more appropriate.
    Most people didn't mind Halloween. It is a fact that all kids, as well as some adults, like to dress up, and Halloween is the one day of the year that you can watch Old Man Krinklemeyer walk through the park in his red long-johns and think that maybe he decided to wear a costume this year, even though you know that he probably just forgot his overalls again.
    Halloween—All Hallows' Eve—the night before the Feast of All Saints'. (This year, celebrated on the Saturday night prior due to school.) It was a holiday for kids and when we were kids we reveled in it. We carved pumpkins in the image of scary faces and lit them with a candle, not so much to frighten off the evil spirits as was the original intent, but because it was fun. We planned out costumes for weeks in advance, hung paper skeletons from the trees; then, when the sun set, ran through the neighborhoods knocking on doors and calling "trick-or treat," all the while hoping to fill our sacks with enough candy to last us until Thanksgiving at least.
    Things change.
    Now parents buy the costumes at Walmart and schlep the kids around to wealthy-looking neighborhoods in their mini-vans, all the while keeping in touch by cell phone.
    In St. Germaine there was still that old-fashioned feeling about the whole thing: kids running up and down Maple and Oak Streets banging on doors and shrieking with delight as some adult dressed as Barney the Dinosaur or Frankenstein or the Wicked Witch of the West answered the door with a plate full of goodies.
    Moosey McCollough was a kid who loved Halloween. The other kids loved it, too, but not with the same fervor as Moosey. He was rabid.
    Moosey was the youngest of the McCollough clan, a ten-year-old for whom the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder might have been invented. All three of the children had been raised by their mother, Ardine, in a little, single-wide mobile home up in Coondog Holler. Ardine scratched a living making and selling quilts and working at the local Christmas tree farm. I helped the McColloughs out when Ardine let me, but she was a proud woman, lean and hard, and wouldn't take much charity. Hence, I had a closet-full of quilts, all beautifully handmade, and I suspected worth quite a bit more than what I'd given Ardine for them.
    PeeDee McCollough, the children's father, was no longer around. In fact, he hadn't been around for a good long time. When he'd been around, he was an abusive husband. Once he became an abusive father as well, he disappeared. Sometimes, especially in these hills, things happened, and no one looked very hard or very long for PeeDee McCollough.
    PeeDee named each of his three children after his favorite thing in the world next to himself, his truck, and his hunting dog: beer. The eldest boy, Bud, was now in his junior year at Davidson College. He was majoring in business and, after flying through his wine courses last summer, was now proud to be one of the seventy-five Master Sommeliers in the United States. His nose for wine was like nothing any of us had ever run into and, along with his expertise, he had a penchant for the lingo. It was not uncommon to hear Bud recommending some wine or another down at the Ginger Cat: "A tender Cabernet as plumose as a suckling calf; like the baby Jesus in velvet pants going down your gullet." And he was right. I was partners with Bud in a wine venture and when he turned twenty-one, we had plans to open a shop in St. Germaine. Bud had a girlfriend here in town, a tapeworm of a girl named Elphina. Just one name, like Madonna or Fabio. She was a self-styled Goth vampiress, embracing the coterie of teen-aged angst to its fullest, complete with the look: black spiked hair, black dresses, black boots, and a black-velvet choker on which dangled some sort of blood-vial jewelry. She