My scariest Halloween

Billy, the kingpin kid in our neighborhood, seemed to know everything about the witch who lived in a tiny hut at the bottom of the steep, wooded ravine that dead-ended my street. We believed everything Billy said. He was smarter and older than any of us — almost a seventh-grader.

Billy's stories about spells "Bruna" would cast if she didn't like you terrified us. We insisted on hearing every gruesome detail. Billy would oblige, but only after much pleading and promises never to tell our parents "upon pain of death."

So real was Billy's witch to us that I told him I'd seen smoke rising from the bottom of the ravine. I don't recall if I actually did. What mattered was impressing Billy.

"Maybe you're not so blind," Billy teased.

That was the same year, you see, that I had started wearing eyeglasses. In the summer I'd borrowed Mom's violin bow for archery practice. Violin bows don't function well with arrows made from peeled tree branches and one backfired into my left eye, damaging the retina.

Mom picked out a hideous pitch-black, thick, horn-rimmed frame. I hated wearing the glasses for all the reasons you can imagine a 7-year-old would. The first moment I put them on, she warned me how "they'd better not leave my face."

I begged her to not make me wear them on Halloween, dressed up as a hobo and all. I'm sure I said something convincing like, "Hobos don't wear eyeglasses."

Back then, most of our costumes were homemade by moms, with some input from their sons and daughters. Most were simple. Ghosts — white sheets with holes. Supermen — blue-dyed Fruit of the Loom undershirts with the iconic "S" drawn with red lipstick and a couple of towels or pillowcases stitched together for capes.

My makeshift "hobo" costume consisted of one of Dad's discarded bowling shirts Mom shredded in strategic places, dirtied-up dungarees, some charcoal soot on my face and a bundle of rags tied to a bamboo fishing pole. And, no getting around it, those all-wrong, pitch-black, thick, horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

I was reminded they'd better not leave my face.

Back then, on Halloween day, we wore our costumes to school. Hopalong Cassidys and Annie Oakleys wore spurs and six-shooters all day. Davy Crocketts shouldered air rifles but had to store them in the cloakroom until recess. I recall fondly how the Dorothys were allowed to keep their "Totos" (real or stuffed) in decorated wicker baskets and shoe boxes.

At day's end, along with the ballerinas, firefighters, aliens and monsters, we all paraded through the halls and back into classrooms for bug juice and butter cookies. Along the route, my hobo costume, accessorized with those cartoonish eyeglasses, drew humiliating hoots and hollers.

That evening, during the exhilaration of trick-or-treating, in the darkness without parents nearby ... I lost them.

I panicked. Billy, who we'd been dutifully following from house to house to house, seized the moment.

"Bruna stole them 'cuz you look so dumb. It's your fault for looking so stupid. Now you havta get them back from her. Better get going."

I was about to confront the witch, believing my parents' wrath would be worse than any spell Bruna could cast. My friends thought otherwise. "Jeez, Dickie …" "You can't go down there…!" "Do you want to die?!"

Instead, I ran home, blubbering to Mom and Dad about how it wasn't my fault, exactly. Billy said Bruna stole my eyeglasses. I described the gruesome things Billy said she could do to us kids (not caring anymore about the "upon pain of death" vow). Would Dad go with me to get my eyeglasses back from Bruna? I swore on the Torah I'd wear them all the time from then on no matter what.

"Bruna? Who's Bruna?!"

"A witch!" I cried.

"Who's Billy?"

"Billy from down the block!"

"Harvey and Sylvia's son?"

"Where are your glasses?"

"I told you! Bruna stealed them!"

That's when Mom looked at me with sympathy — I think. From the bowling shirt pocket of my hobo costume, she retrieved my "stolen" eyeglasses.

"Do you mean these?"

Later on, Mom huddled with Billy's mother, Billy's mother hauled Billy to our house and Billy confessed to me that Bruna the witch was make-believe.

I was disappointed to hear that.

Dick Schwartz lives in Minneapolis.