Keeping Tabs Weekly, Fall 2020
Reprinted from The Piney Bluff Bulletin, Piney Bluff, Mississippi
The Piney Bluff Bulletin
“Where Front Porches Still Matter”
This Halloween, Piney Bluff might just have a monster in our midst.
Last Halloween, dozens of our little ones were robbed by the Treat Taker, a local teenager who cut holes in his mama’s nice bedsheet so he could run up and snatch bags of candy right out of little kids’ hands. In my neighborhood alone, seven trick-or-treaters went home empty-handed after the Treat Taker…well, took their treats. Nobody ever got caught, but most of us in town know it was someone I can’t name here, but his initials are B.E.
The Treat Taker expanded this year into what folks in the know are calling the Pumpkin Prankster. Over the weekend, 186 jack-o’lanterns—I personally went counting them—were defaced. Each one was turned around like the back of ol’ Charlie Brown’s head to show the blank side and was then carved with the exact same face: a big smile with lots of teeth, a long nose, emoji eyes (that’s the way my son described the two slits), and little checkmarks for eyebrows. You’ve seen them on your neighbor’s porch or maybe even your own. And that’s every single pumpkin in the town limits—except one.
The pumpkin sitting on the porch steps at the Eddings house wasn’t even touched.
And that’s the house where George and Bea Eddings live with their two kids—Nova, who’s in second grade with my boy, and wouldn’t you know it, Buddy Eddings, who’s a sophomore at Piney Bluff High.
Now, the community found it in our hearts to forgive Buddy Eddings when he went around town to every public restroom and replaced the toilet paper rolls with duct tape rolls. We also let it be when he switched out Bea’s caramel apples for caramel onions at the Fall Festival two years ago.
I’m not saying Buddy Eddings is responsible for carving new faces on all those pumpkins this year, but I think he’s a more reasonable culprit than what I heard from my boy Ruston yesterday afternoon.
“Nova Edsel told me at school today,” he said, “that Panti carved all those pumpkins so her brother would get in trouble.”
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After a brief bit of chuckling on my part and a couple of underwear jokes, I dug in deeper on what my son said Nova Eddings told him (and the other eleven second graders) about a twist on the Tooth Fairy: a purple monster called Panti.
Seems Nova lost her candy bag to the Treat Taker last Halloween, too, and she was none too happy about it, especially because she was pretty sure it would happen again this year. So, when she lost a tooth last month, she decided to wait up for the Tooth Fairy to ask for a favor on behalf of all the kids in Piney Bluff who had lost their candy last fall.
“She wanted the Tooth Fairy to knock out [her brother] the Treat Taker’s teeth so he couldn’t eat their candy this year,” Ruston said. “But what came wasn’t the Tooth Fairy. It was a monster.”
Panti, I have learned, collects children’s teeth when they fall out, but instead of leaving money, it trades one of the perfect ones in its big grinning head the one that a kid’s lost so the kid can replace it.
“So, Nova isn’t missing a tooth now?” I asked Ruston.
He blew a raspberry and said, “Well, not anymore.”
But this Panti is a right frightful thing, as tall as a person but twice as wide, with a long tail, a body of flowing purple hair, and no arms. It’s so scary to see, Ruston told me, that it wears a tiny smiling mask over the top part of its face to try to calm down the children it brings its teeth to.
“It usually doesn’t work,” he admitted. “Nova said she was scared, but she really wanted some help with [her brother] the Treat Taker, so she had to be brave.”
It seems that Nova Eddings asked for her favor after all, but instead of asking for the Treat Taker to require reconstructive dental surgery, she asked for a little justice: She wanted the Treat Taker to get in trouble for his prank last year.
And it seems, too, that Panti obliged. That face we all discovered Sunday morning after Halloween was over? That’s the face of Panti’s mask.
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Now, this is the first I’ve ever heard of this monster that goes around with a tooth-by-tooth denture plan, but my son seemed to know all about it (and so did the other second graders Nova told, so as the kids say these days, I think that’s pretty sus). Whether it was the Pumpkin Prankster or the purple Panti (and again, I’m letting the jokes go here), all the adults in Piney Bluff are looking at one teenage boy as the one we’re going to hold responsible.
Of course, little will happen to whoever did it—maybe an apology here and there or a few hours with a leaf blower working on the town hall lawn. But Ruston said confidently that he and all the other kids who lost their treats last year have been avenged. And he says Nova Eddings added a cryptic footnote to her story about the monster she recruited for help.
“Nova said her brother (NOTE: She said it, I didn’t) better learn a lesson from this,” Ruston told me. “Because if we get any snow like last year, he’d better be real careful who he throws snowballs at this time.”