Free Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins Page A

Halloween), eight or nine of us found ourselves a half mile or so from the heart of town, out where residences petered out and croplands began. Be it by chance or subliminal design, we were gazing across a field at a large white farmhouse occupied by an unmarried schoolteacher and her bachelor brother. Andrew Garland, a gruff old bird, had retired from surveying to devote all of his time to the farm. His sister, Claude, a severe, stout woman who had been teaching typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping at Warsaw High School since practically the demise of clay tablets, was known to everyone, young and old, as “Miss Claude.”
    Motivated by no spoken plan, we advanced to within forty feet of Chez Garland, finally pausing beneath a black walnut tree, very tall and likely older than all of us put together. The actual black walnut nut, hard and dense of shell, is contained inside a thick, pulpy husk about the size of a handball: a perfect size, alas, for throwing. As there were walnuts aplenty on the ground, it wasn’t long before, silently, spontaneously, our puppet strings pulled perhaps by the spirits of Halloween -- ancient, autumnal, arboreal -- we commenced to hurl the walnuts against the side of the house.
    So far so good. We seemed to be successfully creating the very kind of loud, hopefully scary, ultimately harmless racket that was ever our goal on these annual nights of fright. But then . . . But then there was a new sound: a clink! followed instantly by a cascade of icy tinkles, as if a cheap music box had imploded inside a freeze locker. The noise was repeated. Over and over. Encore! Encore!
    From inside the house, there came a sound disturbingly akin to a scream. Abruptly, the tinkling stopped. We froze. The night, the earth, the universe slammed on its brakes. Time sucked on a chloroform Popsicle. We gaped at one another, neither in triumph nor terror, neither with bravado nor indifference, but with a peculiar kind of disbelief. Then, like a flock of starlings, we whirled as one and took off for town.
    Our young legs covered a lot of ground quickly, but the news of our foul deed got there ahead of us. By the time we reached the B&B poolroom, Lester Scott’s father and Bernard Packett’s older brother were already sitting out front in their pickup trucks, engines idling, and less than a minute later, Lester and Bernard were hauled away. When we looked up the street and glimpsed Willy Jones conferring with our local lawman beside his patrol car, the rest of us developed a sudden yearning for the comforts of hearth and home.
    Each upstairs window in the Garland house comprised a dozen nine-by-eleven-inch panes. How many of these were shattered, I couldn’t say. Reports later ranged from five to twenty-five, depending on who was talking -- and none of us boys was talking much at all. The number, however, was not really the issue. The more relevant question was “Why?”
    Cap’n Andrew, as he was called, wasn’t the most gregarious of men, but certainly none among us bore him ill will. As for Miss Claude, she had a reputation at school as a stern disciplinarian, but nobody ever called her unfair or unkind. Moreover, not a boy in our party had taken one of her classes. Her mission for at least two decades had been to prepare local girls for office work, one of the very few jobs available to young women at that time and in that place. Had we ever given it a moment’s thought, we’d have let out an ecstatic rebel yell that it was the girls, not us, who faced a future of balancing ledgers and taking dictation.
    No, it was neither personal anger nor general resentment of authority that prompted our walnut barrage, nor can it be traced to any inherent meanness; and let’s not get carried away with blaming the demonic agents of Halloween, though our assault never would have occurred on any other day of the year. In the end, I suppose it was the confluence of boredom, hormones, and chance opportunity that led to the