14. Matt
Matt
Two events land on the same night every year, the night before festival weekend really gets going—the costume round, and the opening of the corn maze. That night I had the dubious honor of competing in one and working the other.
The costume round came first, judged at dusk on the gazebo lawn with what felt like the entire population of Sweetbriar arranged on hay bales to watch five grown men humiliate themselves.
I went into it with a strategy, the same way I’d gone into the pie round with a strategy, and the strategy lasted right up until the moment I had to walk out in front of the town with a damn pot on my head.
The theme was Harvest Legends. Elizabeth ran it from the gazebo steps with a microphone, and June ran it from the foot of the steps with her phone held up over the crowd, and between the two of them the whole thing had the energy of a broadcast with the wheels coming off.
“We are LIVE from the Sweetbriar Starling Harvest Festival costume round,” June announced to her phone, “where six grown men have agreed to embarrass themselves for a good cause—save the Starling barn, y’all—and where my aunt is about to pretend she has no idea who any of them are.”
“I am a neutral party,” Elizabeth said into the mic.
“She helped three of them with their costumes.”
“I am a helpful neutral party. June, read the room when they come out; the loudest one wins, you know the drill. Don’t editorialize.”
“I’m absolutely going to editorialize,” June told her followers. “It’s the whole reason I’m here. Aunt Elizabeth, bring out your legends.”
We came out one at a time as Elizabeth called us, and Elizabeth, with the unholy joy of a woman in her element, gave each of us an introduction with more editorializing than strictly necessary—so much for neutrality—while June narrated underneath her to the phone like the world’s least objective sportscaster.
Dale went first, as a scarecrow, which he committed to so thoroughly that he had to be helped off the stage because he’d lashed his own arms to a crossbar and could not get down.
June read a respectable number off her phone for him anyway and informed the internet that “Dale peaked structurally about four minutes ago.” Rosemary Barrett, from the hosts’ table, declared it the finest scarecrow she’d seen in years and reminded everyone for the third time that her grandson was up next.
Brody Cassidy came as the Green Man, the old leaf-and-vine spirit of the woods, and where the rest of us had cobbled our costumes together he’d clearly let his sister-in-law go to town on him—real ivy and oak leaves worked into a hood and collar, a green so deep it went near black at the edges, his face painted in careful whorls that somehow made the easy Cassidy grin look like something older and stranger out of the tree line.
Half the lawn forgot to breathe. June went quiet for a second and then said, faintly, “Okay, the comments have a lot of feelings about the Green Man,” and I watched Brody scan the crowd from up there and find Gwen’s face for exactly one second before he found everyone else’s, and file it.
Then hardware store Tristan, who did not, it turned out, do anything by halves.
He came out as the Headless Horseman, and he’d actually built it—a long black coat, a rig on his shoulders that carried his silhouette up past where his head should have been so that the whole of him read wrong in the lantern light, a carved jack-o’-lantern tucked under one arm with a candle really burning in it.
He didn’t narrate. He didn’t mug. He just walked the length of the stage slow and silent, turned, and stood there being quietly, genuinely unsettling while the crowd went very still and then roared, and a few of the smaller children burst into tears, which June assured everyone on the livestream was “a rave review by Sweetbriar standards.”
June, in fact, tried everything to get a rise out of him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Headless Horseman.” She got right up under the rig with her phone, close enough that the candle in his jack-o’-lantern lit her face orange. “Sir. Sir. On behalf of twelve thousand people who are all typing the same thing right now—do you have any words for your fans?”
Nothing. The silhouette didn’t move.
“Okay. He’s playing hard to get. That’s fine, that’s a choice.
” She circled him, undeterred, narrating to the phone.
“Look at this craftsmanship, you guys; he built this. And if you get down here at the right angle—” she crouched, aiming the camera up under the collar of the coat “—you can just see his eyes. He’s in there.
He’s looking right at me. Tristan. Tristan Harrington.
Blink twice if the coat is period accurate. ”
Whatever was going on behind that collar did not blink.
“He’s not blinking. Folks, he refuses to blink.”
And then the whole headless silhouette of him turned toward her, slow, and I watched June—who talks to twelve thousand strangers a day for a living—run out of words.
It lasted maybe two seconds. Then he walked off the stage without a sound, and the crowd howled, and she stood there with her phone still up.
“He’s GOING,” she informed her livestream, scandalized. “He’s just—he didn’t even—okay. Okay. Well, the meter loved him, so.”
She recovered fast. She’s good at that. But I was standing close enough to see her fuss with her hair, quick, one-handed, before she swung the camera back to her own face, and she looked at the spot where he’d been a second longer than the broadcast required.
Simon Holloway came as Stingy Jack himself—the man the jack-o’-lantern is named for, the one who tricked the Devil twice and got turned away from both heaven and hell and sent to wander the dark with a coal in a hollowed-out turnip.
He’d done it exactly right and exactly understated, which is the most Simon thing imaginable—a battered coat, a lantern carved from an actual turnip rather than the crowd-pleasing pumpkin, an ember glowing inside it, and an expression of profound and put-upon weariness, as if eternal wandering were mostly an inconvenience to his schedule.
He explained the legend to the crowd in three flat sentences, the way he’d recite a daily special, took the laugh he’d engineered with surgical precision, and stepped back.
Rosemary, from the hosts’ table, informed everyone that her grandson had always been the clever one, which Jude, waiting in the wings with his ox, took with visible grievance.
Then Jude.
Jude had built an ox.
I want to be fair to Jude, because he’d put in the work. He came out as Paul Bunyan in a knit cap and a beard he’d enhanced, towing a full-sized foam ox he’d constructed in his garage over what I gather were several obsessive weeks, and the ox had, as promised at the pie round, articulated knees.
“Folks, this is Babe,” Jude announced. “Babe is a rescue.”
“Babe is a pool noodle,” Harper called from the third row.
“Babe is structural foam, Harper, and she has feelings.” He worked a lever somewhere under the ox’s belly and one enormous knee bent, and the front rows lost their minds. “There. You see that? Full articulation. Four weeks of my life.”
“Four weeks.”
“In my garage. Every night.”
“Your truck’s been parked outside in the rain for a month,” Harper yelled from the crowd, “so the ox could have the garage.”
Jude pointed at her without looking. “The ox needed climate control.”
Bella, on her mother’s lap, shrieked with laughter, and Jude made the ox take a bow in her direction, and the whole lawn came apart. He finished with a bow of his own, and looked across at me with the serene confidence of a man who has already won.
And then Elizabeth called my name.
There it was. Some cold-footed part of me had been hoping the whole night would run long, and they’d cut the last contestant, and that part now informed me, quietly, that we were actually doing this.
I’m not a man who performs. I spent a career being the still, serious one at the edge of every gathering in this town—the badge, the flat cop face, the guy you called when it all went wrong—and in about four seconds several hundred of those same people were going to watch me walk into the spotlight with a pot on my head.
I’d let Donna and the back-room costume crew dress me, and I’d avoided every reflective surface since, so I can only tell you what I felt, which was patched wool and the smell of the cedar chest it had been stored in.
A coarse oatmeal-colored shirt, sleeves rolled, laced up the front with a leather thong instead of buttons.
Brown canvas trousers gone soft with age and tucked into boots that weren’t mine.
A burlap satchel of felt apples slung across my chest, the strap cutting a diagonal I kept wanting to straighten.
And the damn pot. A genuine cast-iron three-legged cooking pot scrubbed and lined so it wouldn’t leave a ring, which apparently belonged to Iris, who, once she realized where it was, gave instructions that it had better come back.
From the wings I found her before I found my nerve.
Elizabeth, up on the gazebo steps with the microphone, lit gold, already losing the fight against her own grin—and it steadied me the way it had on the pie-round morning, when she’d tipped her head and dared me.
This was never really about the pot. It was about a barn, and a loan that wouldn’t add up, and a woman who’d run herself into the ground before she’d ask a soul for help.
If putting a cooking vessel on my head in front of the whole town moved that needle one dollar, I’d wear it on patrol.
And under that, plainer and newer and harder to look at straight on—I wanted to be in it.
Not at the edge of the party for once. In it.
So, I walked out into the lantern light, and I put the pot on my head.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Elizabeth said into the microphone, and I heard the laugh she was already fighting, “Officer Matt Hartford. As Johnny Appleseed.”