Here is another practical joke that is clever and just went a little too far into the realms of cruelty.

Not long after the ‘exorcism’ incident, oh, we might have been 14 when this one occurred, my friend Andy and I were just messing around on some stairs at my house. It was summer and we were bored. I sort of nudged him and he almost fell down those stairs. He asked, just out of curiosity, if I was trying to kill him. We both thought that was funny. But then he asked in interesting question. If I had accidentally killed him, what would I do?

I thought for a moment, and came up with a silly answer. I pointed to the narrow strip of dirt between my house and the one next door, and told him I would just bury him there and forget all about him. Oh, how we laughed. Now I don’t remember how the next part started, but we got some shovels and started to dig a grave shaped hole there. Hey, 14 year-old boys like to dig holes. They have a lot of energy. We once dug a huge hole on the top-level of my backyard, and then covered it with plywood and put a layer of dirt over that so we had an underground fort with a little tunnel you had to crawl through to get into it. When grass grew over the ‘roof’, it was an invisible secret fort. But this may be where my idea for a good practical joke came from.

We had a grave. All we needed was a body. And we already had a good story for how the death had occurred, right?

So I got a small piece of plywood wide enough to cover the top half of the grave. Then Andy lay down in the grave and we put the plywood above his upper half. Then I covered the wood with dirt in a nice mound, and packed more dirt around Andy’s chest in the grave. You now could not see the plywood, but you could still see Andy’s legs. But it looked like it was all dirt covering the top half. If you didn’t know he was in a nice air pocket, you wouldn’t think that he could breathe.

The rest was easy. I went inside and found my younger brother Henry, who was 11 or 12 at the time. I did some serious acting. I sobbed that I had accidentally pushed Andy down the stairs, and he was dead, and I tried to bury him, but I was so tired and scared and could Henry please come out and help me finish. He wasn’t buying it. He knew I was up to something. But at last he followed me out to the side of the house. And there was our partially buried corpse. Henry watched for a while as I slowly threw more dirt on Andy’s legs and feet. He thought that Andy was just holding his breath or something. I just finished covering my friend up, then used the flat of the shovel to pack the dirt down. Henry’s eyes slowly got wider and wider. No way Andy could hold his breath that long.

Then I turned to my brother, a tear leaking from my eye, and said, “Should we say a prayer or something?”

He didn’t say a word. He just turned a sort of sickly grey color and went into the house.

We waited a few minutes to make sure he didn’t come back, then I just lifted the plywood up and Andy came up out of the ground like a fresh zombie. He was giggling. “I could hear the whole thing,” he told me.

We filled the grave up, patted it down, and Andy went home. For a week we made sure that Andy stayed away from my house. Henry never said a word to me that whole time. He just watched me with this weird look in his eyes, like he was trying to decide if he should tell anyone.

At the end of that week Andy and I were up at Young’s Market getting some ice cream when Henry walked in. This was the best part of the joke in a way, because watching your little brother shouting “You’re alive. you’re alive,” while dancing around a crowded store is always fun.