Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

7–Haunted House

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): The only gold money Rant spent was, one day he pushed a wheelbarrow down the road, all the way to the Perry Meat Packing plant.

Reverend Curtis Dean Fields (Minister, Middleton Christian Fellowship): Inside the grange hall, the annual haunted house consisted of old oilcloth tarps, smelling from train diesel, hung up to make a pitch-dark tunnel you'd walk inside. How folks hung the tarps, it made the tunnel turn right and left, turning back on itself to confuse you and make the walk last long as possible. Kids waited at the start, and Rant took them through one at a time. Kid stuff inside. At the far end was a party with a costume contest, cake, and candy. One year, a piñata.

Inside, the tunnel was pitch-dark except when lights flashed to show something scary. The far end was most dark, and Rant would blindfold you. He'd put your hand in a big mixing bowl full of cooked elbow macaroni stirred with cold butter, and he'd tell you, "This is brains." You'd feel a bowl of grapes coated with corn oil, or peeled hard-cooked eggs, and Rant would say, "These is pulled-out eyeballs." Pretty tame stuff these days. Hard for a kid's imagination, standing in the dark, feeling a bowl of warm gelatin water while Rant Casey says, "This is fresh blood…" Anymore, it's pretty hard for imagination to make that seem horrible.

Luella Tommy (Childhood Neighbor): At the party end of the haunted tunnel, kids is gobbling cake and playing Ducky Ducky. Playing Pass the Orange. Kids ask can they have napkins to wipe off their hands, after touching the pretend brains and lungs and scary junk. Other kids just wipe their hands on their costumes or on each other.

The little Elliot girl comes out the tunnel, red up to both elbows. Real red. Crying. Dressed as a little angel with tissue-paper wings stretched on coat-hanger wire and a wire halo dusted with gold glitter, the Elliot girl wipes her eyes with one hand and smears red across her face. The Elliot girl, just sobbing, she says, "Rant Casey put a real live heart in my bare hand…"

And I told her, "No, honey. It was make-believe." I spit on a napkin to wipe her face and said, "That heart was just a plain old peeled tomato…" My first fear is she's scared. I'm kneeled down, wiping her face with a paper napkin, and the paper's coming apart. Then I see how sticky the red is, gumming her skirt together in folds. Sticky and blotched with dark spots. Clots. Not just red food color. And there's a smell. On top the diesel stink of those old tarps, that creosote smell same as railroad ties on a hot day, I can smell a sweet kind of marigold, kind of potty smell of meat gone bad.

Glenda Hendersen (Childhood Neighbor): For God's sake. All the kids, just their fingers, one hand or both, some their arms and their costumes, little pirates and fairies and hobos, but they're all smeared with blood. Red blood so old it's gone black. Touching the cake, they got blood on the vanilla icing. Blood on the ladle for the fruit punch, and the orange for Pass the Orange. Fingerprints of blood all over the soda crackers for playing Whistling Crackers.

On the concrete floor of the grange hall, leading out of the tarp tunnel, come an army of little footprints, the tread marks of sneakers and sandals, all printed in sticky blood. Lowell Richards, from the high school, he borrows a flashlight and goes to take a look.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): Worse than the worse-ever police crime-scene photo.

Luella Tommy: Folks rumored maybe Irene Casey brung home and froze her afterbirth when Buddy was born. My first impression was, could be, Buddy made it a scene in the haunted house: the Hanged Man, the Ghost, the Vision of Hell, and Irene Casey's Placenta…

Thank God I was wrong—but not by far off.

Polk Perry (Childhood Neighbor): Wouldn't have sold Rant Casey those eyeballs if I'd knowed what that runt had planned. What went on, that's a surefire sign the Casey boy would grow up to be a killer.

Lowell Richards (Teacher): In the dark, Rant Casey holds the Hendersen boy's hand, dipping that hand into bowls. In the circle of my flashlight, bowls of blood thick as pudding. Bowls of slaughterhouse lungs. Pig and steer lungs, gray and heaped up. Bowls of squirmy gray brains, all busted and mashed together. Bowels and kidneys slopped on the floor.

There's one salad bowl rolling with different-size eyeballs. Cow, pig, and horse eyeballs all staring up, smudged with bloody fingerprints. All this mess starting to warm, starting to stink. Kidneys and bladders and cookie sheets heaped with intestines.

Polk Perry: History is, it's just a nightmare. Cut-off tongues laying everywhere.

Lowell Richards: With me watching, Rant Casey held the Hendersen boy's hand open, palm-up, and set something shining and dark in the fingers, saying, "This is a heart…"

A huge dead cow's heart.

And the Hendersen boy's giggling, blindfolded, and squeezing the heart. Blood oozing out the cut-off tubes.

Bodie Carlyle: It's spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can't be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can't. You got to choose.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Him being a Casey, 'course he made it look by accident. Told folks he thought that's how the haunted house was set up, always. Said he didn't know pillars of the community as trusted and honored and respected as Scout den leaders, grown-ups, would lie to little kids. Just like a Casey to play dumb. Rant said how since forever kids looked forward to touching brains and lungs. Said it was nothing scary to touch old macaroni. Rant made the old, respectable way we did things, using grapes and food color, sound like the shameful crime.

Lowell Richards: Rant Casey wasn't evil. He was more like, he was trying to find something real in the world. Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down adventures. I think Rant wanted everybody to experience just one real adventure. As a community, something to bond folks.

Everybody in town seeing the same old movie or boosting the same peak, that doesn't bring folks together. But after kids came home, their costumes matted with blood, blood under their little fingernails for a week, and their hair stinking, that had folks talking. Can't say they were happy, but folks were talking and together.

Something really did happen that only belonged to Middleton.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): It wasn't only the boosted experiences that bothered Rant. It was dipshit kids done up as soldiers and princesses and witches. Eating cake flavored with artificial vanilla. Celebrating a harvest that didn't occur anymore. Fruit punch that came from a factory. A ritual to placate ghosts, or whatever bullshit Halloween does, practiced by people who had no awareness of that. What bothered Rant was the fake, bullshit nature of everything.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): In Africa, people don't believe in the Tooth Fairy. Instead, they have the Tooth Mouse. In Spain: Ratoncito Pérez. In France: La Bonne Petite Souris. A tiny, magical rodent that steals teeth and replaces them with spare change. In some cultures, the lost tooth must be hidden in a snake or rat burrow to prevent a witch from finding and using the tooth. In other cultures, children throw the tooth into a roaring fire, then, later, dig for coins in the cold ashes.

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.

From a man to an animal to a fairy.

From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairydom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels…dimes…and quarters.

In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.

Shot Dunyun: Talk about frustrating. All that pretense and reality in flux: Gold worth penny candy. Sugar worth gold. Macaroni passing as brains, and adults swearing the Tooth Fairy was real. Even the way a bizarre cultural delusion like Santa Claus can drive half of annual retail sales. Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy. It's beyond frustrating.

That night, even as a little boy, Rant Casey just wanted one thing to be real. Even if that real thing was stinking blood and guts.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise.

Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills.

A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible.

A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything—tangible or intangible—again. To never trust or wonder.

But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.

Reverend Curtis Dean Fields: No matter how well you seal it, wax or varnish, a wood floor can hold an odor. Clear cedar, tongue-in-groove boards like the grange has, the end part of summer you can still smell what happened. Hot weather. Took only one child to vomit her cake—Dorris Tommy, I believe—and the stink set off so many others you couldn't never tell who was number two.

Danny Perry (Childhood Friend): Weren't nothing but blood and barf, like a sticky carpet covered the whole floor. Blood and barf. History is, that's how come folks started calling Buster Casey his nickname—"Rant." On account of every kid doubled over and making nearabouts the same sound. Kids yelled "Rant!" and up comes vanilla cake and frosting. Yelling "Rant!" and spouting out purple fruit punch.

Middleton folks, if they're sick or drunk, they'll still say, "I feel I'm going to Rant," if they're close to throwing up.

Bodie Carlyle: Before Rant moved to the city, he gived me twenty-four gallon milk jugs full to the neck with folks' lost teeth. From little baby teeth going back to grandfolks' mouths, dug out of trunks and keepsake boxes. By my account, the suitcases he hauled to the city, they held nothing but gold money.

Rant, he called those milk jugs "The Middleton Tooth Museum."