Halloween Read online

  “Who thankless sins the gifts he gets,

  “And vainly grasps for more.

  “Then would I never tire, Janet,

  “In elfish land to dwell;

  “But aye at every seven years,

  “They pay the teind (tithe) to hell;

  “And I am sae fat, and fair of flesh,

  “I fear ’twill be mysell.

  “This night is Hallowe’en, Janet,

  “The morn is Hallowday;

  “And, gin ye dare your true love win,

  “Ye hae na time to stay.

  “The night it is good Hallowe’en,

  “When fairy folk will ride;

  “And they, that wad their true love win,

  “At Miles Cross they maun bide.”

  “But how shall I thee ken, Tamlane?

  “Or how shall I thee knaw,

  “Amang so many unearthly knights,

  “The like I never saw?”

  “The first company, that passes by, “

  Say na, and let them gae;

  “The next company, that passes by, “

  Say na, and do right sae;

  “The third company, that passes by,

  “Than I’ll be ane o’ thae.

  “First let pass the black, Janet,

  “And syne (then) let pass the brown;

  “But grip ye to the milk-white steed,

  “And pu’ the rider down.

  “For I ride on the milk-white steed,

  “And ay nearest the town;

  “Because I was a christened knight,

  “They gave me that renown.

  “My right hand will be gloved, Janet,

  “My left hand will be bare;

  “And these the tokens I gie thee,

  “Nae doubt I will be there.

  “They’ll turn me in your arms, Janet,

  “An adder and a snake;

  “But had me fast, let me not pass,

  “Gin ye wad be my maik. (mate, match)

  “They’ll turn me in your arms, Janet,

  “An adder and an ask;

  “They’ll turn me in your arms, Janet,

  “A bale (bundle of sticks) that burns fast.

  “They’ll turn me in your arms, Janet,

  “A red-hot gad (rod) o’ aim (iron);

  “But had me fast, let me not pass,

  “For I’ll do you no harm.

  “First, dip me in a stand o’ milk,

  “And then in a stand o’ water;

  “But had me fast, let me not pass—

  “I’ll be your bairn’s father.

  “And, next, they’ll shape me in your arms,

  “A toad, but and an eel;

  “But had me fast, nor let me gang,

  “As you do love me weel.

  “They’ll shape me in your arms, Janet,

  “A dove, but and a swan;

  “And, last, they’ll shape me in your arms,

  “A mother-naked man:

  “Cast your green mantle over me—

  “I’ll be mysell again.”

  Gloomy, gloomy, was the night,

  And eiry was the way,

  As fair Janet, in her green mantle,

  To Miles Cross she did gae.

  The heavens were black, the night was dark,

  And dreary was the place;

  But Janet stood, with eager wish,

  Her lover to embrace.

  Betwixt the hours of twelve and one,

  A north wind tore the bent;

  And straight she heard strange elritch sounds

  Upon that wind which went.

  About the dead hour o’ the night,

  She heard the bridles ring (fairy bridles have bells);

  And Janet was as glad o’ that,

  As any earthly thing!

  Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill,

  The hemlock small blew clear;

  And louder notes from hemlock large,

  And bog-reed struck the ear;

  But solemn sounds, or sober thoughts,

  The Fairies cannot bear.

  They sing, inspired with love and joy,

  Like sky-larks in the air;

  Of solid sense, or thought that’s grave,

  You’ll find no traces there.

  Fair Janet stood, with mind unmoved,

  The dreary heath upon;

  And louder, louder, wax’d the sound,

  As they came riding on.

  Will o’ Wisp before them went,

  Sent forth a twinkling light;

  And soon she saw the Fairy bands

  All riding in her sight.

  And first gaed by the black black steed,

  And then gaed by the brown;

  But fast she gript the milk-white steed,

  And pu’d the rider down.

  She pu’d him frae the milk-white steed,

  And loot the bridle fa’;

  And up there raise an erlish (eldritch) cry—

  “He’s won amang us a’!”

  They shaped him in fair Janet’s arms,

  An esk [newt], but and an adder;

  She held him fast in every shape—

  To be her bairn’s father.

  They shaped him in her arms at last,

  A mother-naked man;

  She wrapt him in her green mantle,

  And sae her true love wan.

  Up then spake the Queen o’ Fairies,

  Out o’ a bush o’ broom—

  “She that has borrowed young Tamlane,

  Has gotten a stately groom.”

  Up then spake the Queen of Fairies,

  Out o’ a bush of rye—

  “She’s ta’en awa the bonniest knight

  In a’ my cumpanie.

  “But had I kenn’d, Tamlane,” she says,

  “A lady wad borrowed thee—

  “I wad ta’en out thy twa gray een,

  “Put in twa een o’ tree.

  “Had I but kenn’d, Tamlane,” she says,

  “Before ye came frae hame—

  “I wad tane out your heart o’ flesh,

  “Put in a heart o’ stane.

  “Had I but had the wit yestreen,

  “That I hae coft [bought] the day—

  “I’d paid my kane seven times to hell,

  “Ere you’d been won away!”

  PORK PIE HAT

  Peter Straub

  As Hat says: “Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things—I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.”

  This exquisite novella is a story about a story, a mystery about a mystery. In an interview with David Mathew, Peter Straub said his inspiration came from watching a video of “The Sound of Jazz,” a live television broadcast from the late 1950s: “Lester Young wandered into view . . . Someone had to give him a push in the back to get him on his feet and moving toward the microphone. You can see him lick his reed and settle the horn in his mouth. What he plays is one uncomplicated chorus of the blues that moves from phrase to phrase with a kind of otherworldly majesty. Sorrow, heartbreak, and what I can only call wisdom take place through the mechanism of following one note, usually a whole note, with another one, slowly. There he is, this stupendous musician who had once transformed everything about him by the grace of his genius, this present shambles, this human wreckage, hardly able to play at all, delivering a statement that becomes more and more perfect, more and more profound as it advances from step to step . . . Eventually, I wondered: what could lead a person to a place like that, what brought him there? That was the origin of Pork Pie Hat.”

  PART ONE

  1

  If you know jazz, you know about him, and the title of this memoir tells you who he is. If you don’t know the music, his name doesn’t matter. I’ll call him Hat. What does matter is what he meant. I don’t mean what he meant to people who were touched by what
he said through his horn. (His horn was an old Selmer Balanced Action tenor saxophone, most of its lacquer worn off.) I’m talking about the whole long curve of his life, and the way that what appeared to be a long slide from joyous mastery to outright exhaustion can be seen in another way altogether.

  Hat did slide into alcoholism and depression. The last ten years of his life amounted to suicide by malnutrition, and he was almost transparent by the time he died in the hotel room where I met him. Yet he was able to play until nearly the end. When he was working, he would wake up around seven in the evening, listen to Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday records while he dressed, get to the club by nine, play three sets, come back to his room sometime after three, drink and listen to more records (he was on a lot of those records), and finally go back to bed around the time day people begin thinking about lunch. When he wasn’t working, he got into bed about an hour earlier, woke up about five or six, and listened to records and drank through his long upside-down day.

  It sounds like a miserable life, but it was just an unhappy one. The unhappiness came from a deep, irreversible sadness. Sadness is different from misery, at least Hat’s was. His sadness seemed impersonal—it did not disfigure him, as misery can do. Hat’s sadness seemed to be for the universe, or to be a larger than usual personal share of a sadness already existing in the universe. Inside it, Hat was unfailingly gentle, kind, even funny. His sadness seemed merely the opposite face of the equally impersonal happiness that shone through his earlier work.

  In Hat’s later years, his music thickened, and sorrow spoke through the phrases. In his last years, what he played often sounded like heartbreak itself. He was like someone who had passed through a great mystery, who was passing through a great mystery, and had to speak of what had seen, what he was seeing.

  2

  I brought two boxes of records with me when I first came to New York from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d earned a B.A. in English at Northwestern, and the first thing I set up in my shoebox at the top of John Jay Hall in Columbia University was my portable record player. I did everything to music in those days, and I supplied the rest of my unpacking with a soundtrack provided by Hat’s disciples. The kind of music I most liked when I was twenty-one was called “cool” jazz, but my respect for Hat, the progenitor of this movement, was almost entirely abstract. I didn’t know his earliest records, and all I’d heard of his later style was one track on a Verve sampler album. I thought he must almost certainly be dead, and I imagined that if by some miracle he was still alive, he would have been in his early seventies, like Louis Armstrong. In fact, the man who seemed a virtual ancient to me was a few months short of his fiftieth birthday.

  In my first weeks at Columbia I almost never left the campus. I was taking five courses, also a seminar that was intended to lead me to a Master’s thesis, and when I was not in lecture halls or my room, I was in the library. But by the end of September, feeling less overwhelmed, I began to go downtown to Greenwich Village. The IRT, the only subway line I actually understood, described a straight north-south axis which allowed you to get on at 116th Street and get off at Sheridan Square. From Sheridan Square radiated out an unimaginable wealth (unimaginable if you’d spent the previous four years in Evanston, Illinois) of cafes, bars, restaurants, record shops, bookstores, and jazz clubs. I’d come to New York to get a M.A. in English, but I’d also come for this.

  I learned that Hat was still alive about seven o’clock in the evening on the first Saturday in October when I saw a poster bearing his name on the window of a storefront jazz club near St. Mark’s Place. My conviction that Hat was dead was so strong that I first saw the poster as an advertisement of past glory. I stopped to gaze longer at this relic of a historical period. Hat had been playing with a quartet including a bassist and drummer of his own era, musicians long associated with him. But the piano player had been John Hawes, one of my musicians—John Hawes was on half a dozen of the records back in John Jay Hall. He must have been about twenty at the time, I thought, convinced that the poster had been preserved as memorabilia. Maybe Hawes’ first job had been with Hat—anyhow, Hat’s quartet must have been one of Hawes’ first stops on the way to fame. John Hawes was a great figure to me, and the thought of him playing with a back number like Hat a disturbance in the texture of reality. I looked down at the date on the poster, and my snobbish and rule-bound version of reality shuddered under another assault of the unthinkable. Hat’s engagement had begun on the Tuesday of this week—the first Tuesday in October, and its last night took place on the Sunday after next—the Sunday before Halloween. Hat was still alive, and John Hawes was playing with him. I couldn’t have told you which half of this proposition was the more surprising.

  To make sure, I went inside and asked the short, impassive man behind the bar if John Hawes were really playing there tonight. “He’d better be, if he wants to get paid,” the man said.

  “So Hat is still alive,” I said.

  “Put it this way,” he said. “If it was you, you probably wouldn’t be.”

  3

  Two hours and twenty minutes later, Hat came through the front door, and I saw what he meant. Maybe a third of the tables between the door and the bandstand were filled with people listening to the piano trio. This was what I’d come for, and I thought that the evening was perfect. I hoped that Hat would stay away. All he could accomplish by showing up would be to steal soloing time from Hawes, who, apart from seeming a bit disengaged, was playing wonderfully. Maybe Hawes always seemed a bit disengaged. That was fine with me. Hawes was supposed to be cool. Then the bass player looked toward the door and smiled, and the drummer grinned and knocked one stick against the side of his snare drum in a rhythmic figure that managed both to suit what the trio was playing and serve as a half-comic, half-respectful greeting. I turned away from the trio and looked back toward the door. The bent figure of a light-skinned black man in a long, drooping, dark coat was carrying a tenor saxophone case into the club. Layers of airline stickers covered the case, and a black porkpie hat concealed most of the man’s face. As soon as he got past the door, he fell into a chair next to an empty table—really fell, as if he would need a wheelchair to get any farther.

  Most of the people who had watched him enter turned back to John Hawes and the trio, who were beginning the last few choruses of “Love Walked In.” The old man laboriously unbuttoned his coat and let it fall off his shoulders onto the back of the chair. Then, with the same painful slowness, he lifted the hat off his head and lowered it to the table beside him. A brimming shot glass had appeared between himself and the hat, though I hadn’t noticed any of the waiters or waitresses put it there. Hat picked up the glass and poured its entire contents into his mouth. Before he swallowed, he let himself take in the room, moving his eyes without changing the position of his head. He was wearing a dark gray suit, a blue shirt with a tight tab collar, and a black knit tie. His face looked soft and worn with drink, and his eyes were of no real color at all, as if not merely washed out but washed clean. He bent over, unlocked the case, and began assembling his horn. As soon as “Love Walked In” ended, he was on his feet, clipping the horn to his strap and walking toward the bandstand. There was some quiet applause.

  Hat stepped neatly up onto the bandstand, acknowledged us with a nod, and whispered something to John Hawes, who raised his hands to the keyboard. The drummer was still grinning, and the bassist had closed his eyes. Hat tilted his horn to one side, examined the mouthpiece, and slid it a tiny distance down the cork. He licked the reed, tapped his foot twice, and put his lips around the mouthpiece.

  What happened next changed my life—changed me, anyhow. It was like discovering that some vital, even necessary substance had all along been missing from my life. Anyone who hears a great musician for the first time knows the feeling that the universe has just expanded. In fact, all that happened was that Hat had started playing “Too Marvelous For Words,” one of the twenty-odd songs that were his entire repertoire at the time. Ac
tually, he was playing some oblique, one-time-only melody of his own that floated above “Too Marvelous For Words,” and this spontaneous melody seemed to me to comment affectionately on the song while utterly transcending it—to turn a nice little song into something profound. I forgot to breathe for a little while, and goosebumps came up on my arms. Halfway through Hat’s solo, I saw John Hawes watching him and realized that Hawes, whom I all but revered, revered him. But by that time, I did, too.