Albrecht Gessler, Fierce Austrian Tyrant
By Jane Snyder
When Tad was little, he loved making plans. Every day in October, we talked about what we’d do on Halloween. His plastic pumpkin would be good for candy, he said, it held such a lot, but I should bring along a sack when we went trick or treating downtown in the afternoon just in case. Remember how generous the merchants were last year?
We’d empty the pumpkin when we got home before we went trick or treating from house to house. He who travels fastest travels light, he said solemnly. I didn’t tell him no, it’s he who travels fastest travels alone.
When he got in bed with me on Halloween morning, we heard rain. “Quite a deluge,” he observed, when we drew back the curtains to look.
“Well, it isn’t an insurmountable obstacle,” he snuggled back in beside me, the big words giving him confidence. “Is it?”
Of course not, I told him. We’ll do it all.
We stayed in bed a long time, talking.
Tad wanted to go as Gessler, from the William Tell story. He’d assembled his costume from his dress up box. A gray tunic I’d made him for playing knights, over a sweatshirt for warmth. He tied my paisley scarf around the crown of a green felt hat we’d gotten at a garage sale. “I think this is very much what Gessler would have worn,” he said, looking at himself in the hallway mirror.
The rain held off for the downtown trick or treating but the afternoon sky was full of dark clouds, layered on top of each other.
Tad loved it. “You can almost see a witch up there, steering her broomstick between the clouds.”
Downtown, when adults asked Tad who he was supposed to be, he’d say, in his stiff little professor’s voice, that he was Gessler, the tyrant who’d had his hat placed on top of a pole in the market square and demanded the Swiss peasants salute it. William Tell, who was known, Tad said, as a skilled archer, refused, and Gessler told him to shoot an apple off his small son’s head. Or die.
Oh, they’d say. I’ve heard of William Tell. Where’s your apple?
When they smiled over his head at me, I’d smile back.
Power Rangers were big that year and I wondered if I should have talked Tad into being one. He might have liked wearing a shiny red jumpsuit, yelling “It’s morphing time, guys,” with the other little boys.
Last week, when I’d called my parents for my father’s birthday, I’d told my mother about our Halloween plans, wanting to share Tad’s excitement with her.
Ridiculous, she’d said. You might as well make him a coach from a pumpkin and train mice to pull it.
Guess who you won’t be seeing at Christmas, I thought, and would have said except my dad had an elevated T-cell count at his last check-up. He had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had been in remission for four years since the last round of chemo.
My mother said the doctor wasn’t happy with my dad’s numbers only, of course, my dad was such a fighter.
So nothing’s going to happen, I told myself.
My mother wouldn’t have approved of our going out after dark. The rain started again and it was too windy to hold the umbrella. His hat lost its shape and green dye dripped down his neck. Everywhere we went they were surprised, said they hadn’t expected trick or treaters on a night like this.
When we came home Jon, his dad, told him he looked like Paddington Bear in his soggy hat. He studied his reflection in the mirror again, laughed. “I do, don’t I? So now I have two costumes.”
When we changed into dry clothes before going out to dinner he found another hat and tunic, still wanting to be Gessler.
At Pizza Hut, the costumed employees were having a good time.
“Watch out, Mommy,” Tad yelled when the stepmother from Snow White, in her old crone disguise, approached me with an apple in her hand. That made them laugh and they gave him an extra goody bag, set him on a bale of hay, took an Instamatic. “Big smile, Herr Gessler.”
Tad was delighted. “A party! We didn’t expect this.”
Ghost Face, from Scream, brought our food. When the artificial blood streamed across his face, Tad whimpered.
“It’s just me, Dude.” He pulled his mask off, revealing himself as Luke, a goofy high school kid who worked there, told Tad knock knock jokes whenever we came in.
“Look, I’ll show you.” Two thin layers of clear plastic held in a frame. Luke let Tad squeeze the bulb, watch the fake blood move up and down between the plastic sheets.
“Ingenious,” Tad said gamely, but he ate his pizza sitting on my lap.
Jon said he wished he could have spent the day with us. “I feel as if I’m missing out.”
It would have been nice, I said. Maybe it’ll work out next year. But I thought he’d get bored, would have ideas of his own, wouldn’t want to do what Tad wanted.
On the way home from the restaurant Tad had gotten an idea for a tableaux, a woodland scene, he called it, and he and I were at the kitchen table working on it when my mother called.
I stood at the kitchen counter to talk to her and watched Tad unwrap his Tootsie Rolls from trick or treating. He wanted them for logs in the woodpile to put in front of a Lego house he’d built with Jon.
“I’ve been calling you all day. You’re never home.”
I hoped she wouldn’t start on Halloween. She’d never had anything against it before. When I was five my little sister Suzie and I had tonsillitis and couldn’t go trick or treating. Suzie was too sick to get up but I put on my yellow and brown dog suit and my mother pulled my hair into soft pony tails on both sides of my face. I was pleased with the effect, thought the pony tails resembled silky cocker spaniel ears.
We set up the card table in the little hall outside the bedroom I shared with Suzie and my mother and I sat there while my father answered the door for the trick or treaters. He came to be with us when the doorbell wasn’t ringing, brought me one of the packs of candy cigarettes they were giving as treats. The cigarettes were worthless as candy, just sugary dust, dry on my swollen throat. What I liked was holding them between my index and middle fingers, the way my mother held hers.
“A dog who smokes,” she marveled as I pretended to flick ashes into the ashtray. “Do you know any other tricks, cute little doggie?”
“I can go in the toilet.”
They laughed and my father patted my head. “You’re corrupting the best bird dog I ever had, Elaine.”
Tad removed the roof from his Lego house carefully, placed a Lego figure inside.
“You knew Daddy was supposed to start chemo again today, didn’t you?”
Yes, I told her. I had known.
He’d had chemo twice before. Radiation too.
We’d been to see them in August and I’d thought he was all right. Irritable, of course, but with me, not Tad, and I was surprised when he’d turned down an invitation to go along when we took Tad for ice cream. It was the sort of thing he enjoyed, showing Tad off, having people say how smart he was.
“No, you don’t know. Because he didn’t have it.”
He’d gotten sick during the night, couldn’t clear the vomit from his throat, couldn’t swallow. My mother called the ambulance. Against his wishes.
I told my mother she’d done the right thing.
“I don’t recall asking for your approval.”
“Where is he now?” I wondered if she was working up to tell me he was dead. “In the hospital?”
“He’s here. At home. They talked to him at the hospital this morning. He said he wanted to die at home.” I imagined the scene. My father had been a professor so they’d call him doctor, thinking to flatter him. He’d always disliked titles, but he’d play along, because he’d feel sorry for them, having to give him bad news.
“Nobody asked what I wanted,” my mother said. “They think every woman’s a nurse.”
I thought of her helping him to bed, then coming downstairs to call me.
“I have to live here,” she said. “After he dies.”
I asked if there was anything I could do.
“What? What do think you could do?”
Tad looked up at me and smiled.
Three months, I told myself. Hospice means he’s got three months to live. Tad and I could have our life together for a little longer.
When I’d called the week before my father thanked me for the card I’d sent. It was a new thing then, had a chip inside for recording. When he opened it he heard Tad singing "Happy Birthday.”
“You tell him that card was fine,” my father had said. “You tell him I’m going to keep it for as long as I can.”
I asked my mother if she’d like us to come.
“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”
No worries, I said to myself, I won’t.
“I’d like to be with you and Dad,” Give me a way in, I wanted to say. Please. “If you’d like.”
She wasn’t ready to say what she would or wouldn’t like. “I’d better call Suzie. She goes to bed so early.” She’d called me first, she said, because I was the oldest.
Though it seemed to me her tone said I was of no use, nor likely to be.
I told her I was sorry, that I would do whatever she wanted.
“I’m not asking you for anything.”
I looked around our squat little kitchen after she hung up, at the worn linoleum, the cabinets with their dark veneers.
Tad was still unwrapping Tootsie Rolls. He’s gotten too much, my mother would have said. See, he’s wasting them. They’ll get dirty.
He’d taken a wooden bear from my dresser, posed it in front of the Lego house. “I like how the bear is standing up. It makes him look bigger.”
When I was his age I didn’t touch my parents’ things without permission. It wouldn’t have occurred to Tad to ask, I’d have liked telling my mother, because he knew I’d be in sympathy with whatever he wanted.
“The woodcutter peers out the window and sees the bear standing in his yard. Well, it wouldn’t be a yard as we use the term, just a small clearing in the forest.”
On the psychiatric unit where I used to work they’d have called the overly precise way Tad talked stilted speech. Not a good thing; it meant an inadequate understanding of social cues.
He isn’t so wonderful, I heard in my mother’s voice. Just a little boy who talks big.
At bedtime I took extra care, helping Tad brush his sticky teeth. He laughed sleepily when I compared his mouth to the Molasses Swamp in Candyland and we talked about Halloween, about how much fun we’d had, before he started thinking about his woodland scene again.
The bear, he said, was twice the woodcutter’s size.
More, I thought.
He reached for my hand, meaning I was to stay till he was all the way asleep. “But the woodcutter isn’t scared.”
“He isn’t?”
“He knows he’s safe in his little house.”
THE END