"Are you going to honor Elmo at Samhain?" I asked Eddie. We were taking a walk the other day, between things, roughly following the periphery of the campus. The sugar maples in the avenue along the main entrance are turning, and the trees blazed orange above our heads.
Elmo, you remember, was his dog.
"I don't know," he said, after a bit. "I guess so. I've never heard anyone memorialize an animal, except you with Sanchez."
"You remember!"
Sanchez was the kitten I had when I was a little boy.
"I have a good memory."
"Well, it can't possibly be wrong, even if it's rare, or someone would have said something about it."
"I suppose," Eddie acknowledged. "I guess I will. It just hurts to think about."
"I'm sorry?"
"No, I think about it even when you don't bring it up. It just...it wouldn't be so bad if he were just dead, it's that I can't stop thinking maybe it was my fault."
"Eddie, he would have been put down months earlier at the shelter, if it wasn't for you. You did everything you could."
"Maybe I should have been able to do better."
"You're going to make yourself crazy," I told him.
"I'm already crazy," he said.
We were quiet for a bit.
"I guess it's coming up, though," he said.
"What?"
"Samhain. Whatever I'm going to do, I'd better get ready to do it."
It's true. We're three weeks out, but already the campus is more than half decorated for the holiday, mostly harvest-themed stuff, pumpkins, weirdly-shaped squashes, and decorative gourds, dried shocks of corn stalks....And then there's the Halloween paraphernalia, the bats and witches and arch-backed cats, which have almost nothing to do with Samhain but which a lot of the students, mostly yearlings, enjoy as a kind of camp--it's all through our dorms, even if not elsewhere on campus. In a week or two, Charlie and his team will put up the grape and bittersweet vines in the Mansion, and people will start making the memorial alters.
But....
"I can't believe it's this close," I said.
"Do you have your votes yet?"
"No, not all of them. But I will."
"Who don't you have?"
"Charlie," I admitted.
"Charlie! But he's the main one you need! What's your hold-up?"
I should explain; mastery candidates technically only need the vote of their own master--Charlie, in my case--to finish. It's not like the novices who need the votes of all the masters. But the other requirement for earning the green ring is we have to pass a job interview with a committee made up of some of the masters, and none of us know who our committee will be. So we've all decided it's smart to get the approval of all of the masters, just in case.
"Well, I haven't asked him yet."
"Daniel!"
"I know, I know. I will. I just...can't."
We were quiet for a bit.
"Do you have your votes?" I asked.
"No. I haven't asked. I'm not ready. I think I'll be ready by Brigid, I have three months. If I'm not, well, what's another year?"
"There are times I'm afraid I'll never get out of here," I admitted. "I'll be stuck as a student here forever...institutionalized. And then sometimes I'm afraid I won't be able to stay."
"I know. Me, too."
We were quiet again for a bit. Late-season crickets sang in the grass. The air was cool, the sun getting ready to set. A car sped by on the main road nearby and startled both of us--it seemed like it was from another world.
"So, what's you're hold-up?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I'm just not happy," he said. "I'm Ed, I'm supposed to be happy." The name, Ed, which in his case is not short for Edward or Edgar, or anything like that, means happy. "But I think I lost something when I lost my dog, and I don't think I'll get it back."
And just at that moment, I kid you not, one of those flame orange leaves fell and it settled in his hair.
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