万圣节笑话 英语

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All Saints Day: A Story
ANGELA PNEUMAN

Word was that the missionary kid had a demon, though no one was supposed to know. The Boyd family was visiting East Winder only for the weekend, and already eight-year-old Prudence had heard it from her younger sister, Grace, who heard it from her new friend, Anna, whose father was going to cast it out. Prudence figured that a cast-out demon would look like a puddle of split pea soup the size of a welcome mat, and that it would move around the room, blob-like, trying to absorb its way into people. Her own father, the Reverend Yancey Boyd, didn't believe in demons or in talking about demons except to say he didn't believe in them, end of discussion.

"The demon made Ryan Kitter paint himself purple all over," Grace said.

"All over?" Prudence asked, "even his privates?"

"That's how they found him," Grace said. She was six. "The paint dried up and he was crying because it hurt him to pee."

The girls stood in front of the mirror in the spare room at the Moberlys' house. It was the afternoon of November first, and that night there was an All Saints Day party for kids at the First United Methodist, where the Reverend Yancey Boyd might be the new minister. Prudence was busy cutting a slit for Grace's head in a piece of old brown sheet. Everyone had to go as someone from the Bible, so she was turning Grace into John the Baptist with his head on a platter.

"There's no such thing as demons," Prudence said, only because she hadn't been the one to hear the story first. She hacked at the sheet with scissors, the blades ll as butter knives. When she managed a hole, she threw the sheet over Grace's head.

Ryan Kitter's whole family were missionaries. They had returned from Africa ahead of schele, e to the demon, and were camping in the church basement until they found a house. They got to cook on hot plates and take sponge baths. Prudence thought that if anyone deserved to camp in the church basement it was her own family, since her father was the one who might be the minister. He'd been ordained in three states. At the Moberlys' house, the girls were stuck in a dark, damp room that smelled like motor oil. Before the Moberlys had done it over for their daughter, who was grown, it had been a garage, and twice already Prudence had seen centipedes, one rippling into a crack between cement blocks, one behind the framed picture of Jesus over the bed.

"Ryan likes to be in a dark room," Grace said, pushing her head through the hole in the sheet. "And he doesn't talk to anyone except his mother."

"Well, maybe he doesn't have anything to say," said Prudence, regarding her with a frown. Grace still looked like herself, only in a brown sheet, now, blond hair coming out of her braid, and nothing like John the Baptist.

In the picture over the bed Jesus wore a robe with billowing sleeves and a rope belt, and Prudence needed something to tie around Grace's waist. She rummaged through the cardboard box of odds and ends that Mrs. Moberly had provided. At home in North Carolina, their mother kept old towels and drapes in a trunk, and a drapery cord would have done the trick. But at home they would not be dressing like Bible characters for a party; instead they would have already gone trick-or-treating the night before. They would have worn last year's outfits switched around—Prudence as a floor lamp, Grace as a blue crayon—since their mother wasn't in any kind of shape to make new ones. Here in East Winder, Kentucky, no one was of a mind to trick-or-treat, because Halloween was pagan.

"Ryan's father thinks he has a demon and his mother isn't sure," Grace said. "They took him to doctors, but a doctor can't do anything against a demon. Anna saw a man with a demon swallow a sword in Tennessee. She saw another demon bend a man in half when her dad tried to cast it out."

Prudence made it a point not to be interested. She said, "Really?" and "Hmmm," as she unearthed a scarf and tied it around Grace's waist, so that the ends hung down, then pulled and tucked at the sheet. She put her hands on her hips and stepped back to look. "Not bad," she said. "We'll draw you a beard with eye pencil, but you've got to have a knife or a hatchet or something to make it look real. And a platter."

Mrs. Moberly stood barefoot in front of the kitchen sink, peeling apples for a pie. Her feet were puffy, and they smooched against the linoleum. It looked like she'd picked her baby toenails clean away. Prudence's mother, who was still sleeping upstairs in the Moberlys' bedroom, had always told Prudence to keep her shoes on; if anyone wanted to see her bare feet, they would ask.

"How're the costumes coming?" asked Mrs. Moberly through a mouthful of apple peel. She wore a blue and white checked apron and had made covers of the same material for the toaster, coffee-maker and some other small appliance that Prudence couldn't make out by its shape.

"Fine," Prudence said. "Could we please borrow a meat cleaver?"

"A meat cleaver?" Mrs. Moberly's hands stopped, knife poised over a peeled, cored apple. It looked naked and cold. "What Biblical character used a meat cleaver?"

"It's a secret," Prudence said, before Grace could open her mouth.

"A meat cleaver in church? I don't think so," said Mrs. Moberly. "Someone could get hurt. How about another idea? How about you go as a shepherd? Mr. Moberly has an old cane somewhere. Or Mary? Mary never used a meat cleaver."

"No one's using it," Prudence said.

"Meat cleavers are sharp," said Mrs. Moberly. "Meat cleavers are not toys. I don't think your mother would be happy if I allowed you to go to church with a meat cleaver. She's not feeling very well as it is." Mrs. Moberly sliced the apple into eighths in four deft strokes. "Your father tells me she likes apple pie."

"She's feeling fine," Prudence said. "She's just tired."

Mrs. Moberly looked at Prudence and smiled in the way alts sometimes smiled at Prudence, lips peeling back from patiently clenched teeth. Then Mrs. Moberly smiled at Grace, who looked at her feet. "What's that you're wearing, Grace?" Mrs. Moberly said. "Let me guess. You're Mary Magdalene, or Ruth."

Grace shook her head.

"Esther?"

"A man," Grace said.

"Moses?"

"It's a surprise," Prudence said again. "How about some tin foil? We could save it and you could use it again to cover something."

"Tin foil I can do," said Mrs. Moberly, and handed her the box. "Listen, girls," she said, smiling again. "What do you think of your visit so far? Think you might like to live here?"

"We won't live here," Prudence said. "We'll have a parsonage like at home."

"Well, yes," said Mrs. Moberly. "That's what I meant. East Winder's quite a town. I think living here would do your mother a world of good."

Prudence stared at Mrs. Moberly and raised her left eyebrow, something she'd taught herself how to do. Mrs. Moberly's eyes did not seem to be any real color. Under one eye, Prudence could see a tiny length of blue vein beneath Mrs. Moberly's skin, like a fading pen mark.

Mrs. Moberly blinked at her once and turned to Grace. "How about you, dear? Wouldn't you like to live here?"

Prudence answered for Grace as she pulled her towards the kitchen door. "We don't care," she said in her boredest voice.

I don't care was what their mother had to say about moving. Her name was Joyce, and I don't care was what she said about many things, usually at the end of a long, tired sigh. Then she'd talk on the phone to her sister, Char—who wasn't saved—and go to bed in the middle of the day, sometimes for days in a row, and when Prudence went in to lass her goodnight she'd already be asleep and smelling like damp books. Yancey said it had to do with the baby who died before he was born in August, but when Aunt Char came to stay for a week she said no. She said this was Joyce in college all over again, or just Joyce waking up, finally, and coming apart, which he should have expected. Yancey said what's that supposed to mean, and Aunt Char said it means nothing, nothing at all, and that Joyce had made her bed. (Joyce used to testify, proudly, that her family in Greenville thought she was crazy for loving the Lord. She'd been raised a twice-a-year churchgoing Methodist, not evangelical. Yancey's preaching had been what saved her before they got married, and Prudence could tell that Aunt Char didn't like that fact one bit.)

Back in the spare room Prudence emptied out the cardboard box of odds and ends. She cut the box apart at the folds, traced the top of Grace's head in the center of one of the long sides, cut out the circle and finally taped on sheets of tin foil. Then she fitted the whole platter over Grace's head and bunched part of the sheet into the hole at her neck to hold it steady.

Grace squinted at herself in the mirror.

"Do your head this way," Prudence said, leaning her head to the side and fluttering her eyelids. "Try to look like you just got your head cut off."

Grace stuck out her tongue and said, "Blllhh." Her head lolled to the side. Then she shrugged her head out of the platter and began cutting out a long, curved knife shape Prudence had drawn on another piece of cardboard. "They tried sending Ryan Kitter to regular school last week," Grace said. "He went to first grade with Anna King."

"Hmmm," said Prudence. She peered into the Moberlys' closet where she'd already found her own costume. Behind the coats and jackets and Mr. Moberly's old suits hung several leotards clipped to hangers with clothespins, and one pink tutu, the tulle gone flat and limp as a newspaper, all from when their daughter had taken ballet. Inside a box underneath the pink tutu, Prudence had found a spangly halter top with matching tights and a long, gauzy skirt, store tags still attached.

Now Prudence took out the costume and laid it on the bed. The halter was red with long sleeves and tiny round mirrors sewn on and yellow embroidery everywhere. The neck and sleeves had silky yellow fringe, and at the bottom edge, just above where her belly button would show, the fringe ended in tiny wooden beads that clacked softly against each other.

"In the lunchroom he stood at the trash can and ate all the bread pudding and creamed spinach that nobody wanted, and when the teacher caught him and made him stop, he cried. Then he threw up, then he threw a fit and they took him right out of school." Grace stopped cutting, her scissors wedged deep in the cardboard, and eyed the costume. "Ooooh. Who are you again?"

"Salome," Prudence said. "The one who asked for your head on a platter."

Prudence slipped off her pants and pulled on the tights and skirt. She did a practice kick out to the side, and the gauzy material traveled up into the air with her leg then floated down. It was see-through. In the picture Prudence had seen in a book in her father's study, Salome was a dark-skinned, smiling, barefoot girl with her hair pulled back, wearing an outfit a lot like this one. Her arms had been raised high above her head, her body in mid-sway, a gentle version of the bump-and-grind Prudence had perfected from a dance show on television, before her father found out she was watching.

No wonder the king had wanted to give Salome anything she wanted. Prudence had curly dark hair, too—almost black—and now she pulled it into a ponytail so tight it made her eyes slanty. She moved her hips in a little circle and waved her arms, first out in front of her, then to her sides, then over her head.

"Does Mrs. Moberly know you're wearing that?" Grace said.

"Mrs. Moberly is a pain."

"I want to be someone who dances."

"You can't dance if your head's cut off."

"You're not even supposed to dance," said Grace, and it was true, though the Reverend Yancey Boyd said it wasn't because of dancing itself, but what dancing led to.

"This is different," said Prudence. "It's pretend."

Grace crimped tin foil onto the blade of the cardboard knife and began coloring the handle black with a magic marker. "Once a demon gets in, you act different," she said. "They get in when you get cut open and bleed. Anna's not allowed to have her ears pierced. In Africa, Ryan was crossing the street with their house woman and they got hit by heathens in a truck. They were holding hands and she died and he broke his arm. The bone was sticking out through his skin, and that's when it happened. Demons sneak in wherever they can, and someone has to get them out so you can go back to the way you were. Tonight Anna's dad is going to get the demon out of Ryan. It's a secret, because it's not that kind of church, but Anna's dad says it should be."

Prudence had the halter on over her shirt, and she was stuffing the bosom with Grace's dirty undershirt from the day before. "Stop talking about that," she said. "At the party they'll have to guess who we are, so I'll go first and do my dance, then I'll stop and say, "Cut off the head of John the Baptist, voice crying in the wilderness, who eats locusts and honey, and give it to me on a silver platter." Then you come on up and stand beside me."

"What do I say?"

"You don't say anything. We'll have the knife on the platter and ketchup for blood and you just walk like this," Prudence staggered around the bed. "You could collapse, maybe, or just follow me away. Wait and see. Everyone else will be Mary and Joseph and Noah or some other mb thing."

"A demon could have gotten into Mom when the baby came out," Grace said.

Prudence stopped staggering. "No," she said. "She is just very tired. She just needs her rest." Prudence kept looking at Grace until Grace nodded. Then Prudence pulled up her shirt to see what the halter would look like against her stomach.

"Ryan has a demon of shock," Grace said.

Prudence sucked in her stomach until it looked hollow. Sexy. She turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder for the rear view.

"Mom could have a demon of tiredness," Grace said.

Prudence kept sucking in her stomach until it hurt. "Don't say that anymore," she said, gritting her teeth. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

The Reverend Yancey Boyd had eyes so light they almost weren't blue at all, and wavy hair close to his head, and when he talked he sounded wise. Aunt Char said that Joyce married him because he looked like Paul Newman, and because he was sincere, though she said it was no excuse. Prudence was used to women going weepy around him, so it was no surprise when at dinner Mrs. Moberly started sharing the heartache of their daughter.

Belinda Moberly had grown up and gone to college, began Mr. Moberly (a good, evangelical college, put in Mrs. Moberly), and under the influence of a philosophy professor, said Mr. Moberly (who was later fired, said Mrs. Moberly), she'd first become a Unitarian, and then an atheist. And she was living in sin, out of wedlock, with a firelighter.

"We did our best," said Mrs. Moberly. "I don't know what else we could have done."

Over the table hung a low, stained-glass chandelier that Mrs. Moberly had made in a class, which cast a ring of tiny yellow crosses around the walls of the wood-paneled dining room.

"She has a good foundation," the Reverend Yancey Boyd said to Mrs. Moberly, and he patted her hand. The patting of hands was usually Joyce's department. She took care of the comforting while Yancey did the talking. It wasn't a good idea for him to touch too many women. He was that handsome. "When children have been brought up in the Lord, He marks them for life. Children—" Yancey passed a hand over Grace's blond head—"have their own kind of openness to the Lord. They may grow up and try other roads, but something inside them always knows better. I believe your daughter has a great advantage."

The Reverend Yancey Boyd sounded encouraging, but he looked sad. Before supper Prudence had found him sitting on the bed beside Joyce, trying to make her eat some crackers from the tray Mrs. Moberly had fixed. Prudence couldn't see her mother's face, but she could hear her whispering how she shouldn't have tried to come, and Prudence had seen how the curl she'd put in her hair the day before, for the trip, had flattened out against her head.

"I don't understand it," Mr. Moberly was saying about his daughter. He was a plumber with shoulders so wide that Prudence didn't see how he could crawl under any sink. He split a biscuit in half and buttered it, and when he finished he put the whole bottom of the biscuit into his mouth.

"I tell her we want her to be happy," Mrs. Moberly said, "and she tells me happiness is overrated. She says she's as happy as she can be and live with herself. I ask her, but do you know Jesus as a personal savior, Belinda, that's real happiness—you know, Reverend—and she tells me she would believe if she could, but she can't. I don't know what to do with her." When Mrs. Moberly paused to drink her water, her hand shook a little. "I guess we're not promised we'll always understand, are we, Reverend?"

The Reverend Yancey Boyd smiled in a way that made him look even sadder. "No," he said, "we are not."

Grace picked at her food. She had the nervous hiccups, which didn't sound like regular hiccups at all, but like breathing with little coughs. And she was chewing at the inside of her mouth, which she wasn't supposed to do. Once she'd made herself bleed. Prudence nudged Grace with her elbow, and Grace stopped.

By the time they reached the church parking lot that evening, it was dark and cold. The leaves smelled like fall turning into winter. Prudence had stuffed the platter down the front of Grace's long pink parka like a shield, to hide it, and she'd hidden eye pencil and lipstick and ketchup packets from Burger King in the pockets of her own coat. She'd put pants on over her tights and rolled up the gauzy skirt, too, because she thought Mrs. Moberly might recognize it before their turn.

"Where are the Kitters staying?" Prudence asked, as they walked through the parking lot towards the back entrance.

"Who?" asked Mrs. Moberly.

"The boy with the demon," said Grace, stomping up the cement steps to the door.

"What?" Mrs. Moberly said. She shifted a Tupperware container of cookies to her other hand and held open the church door. Inside she squatted down beside Grace and peered into her face. "What demon?"

"Never mind," Prudence said. "What do the Kitters sleep on? Do they have a bed or just nap mats? Do they have a sofa and chair and television or just Sunday school furniture?"

"I wouldn't know," Mrs. Moberly said. "I haven't seen it. It's their home, you know, for now, until they find a house. You can't just go charging into people's homes unannounced, even if they do live in the church."

"I wouldn't go charging in," Prudence said.

"You're going to have a great time at the party," said Mrs. Moberly, steering them down the basement steps. "Just think of all the new friends you'll make here." Mrs. Moberly spoke in a bright voice and smiled so forcefully her jaw muscles bulged.

They moved down a wide, dim hall towards the fellowship room at the far end, an open door full of light and spilling out muted voices. Three narrow halls branched off on either side of this wide hall, and at these dark openings the air came cool and quiet. Prudence lagged behind and slipped down the last hall before the fellowship room. She tried two doors, but they were locked. She peered through the long narrow windows over the doorknobs, but it was too dark to see anything.

Mrs. Moberly appeared silhouetted at the mouth of the hall. "Did we lose you?"

"No," said Prudence.

The fellowship room was full of lads and parents. A girl wearing a dingy white sheep hood with ears, her straight hair sticking stiffly out around her face, came right up to Grace and hugged her.

"Hi, Anna," Grace said.

参考资料：From the Autumn 2003 Issue