A Season of Gifts Read online

  She seemed to pour strong drink out on the grass. Now she hauled off and threw the bottle. She had an arm on her. The bottle glinted in moonlight, hit her cobhouse roof, and rolled off.

  “Now, now, Mrs. Dowdel,” a voice said, “calm yourself. ‘A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.’ Ecclesiastes. 8:15.”

  I’d have known that voice in the fiery pit. It was the Texas Tornado, Delmer “Gypsy” Piggott. Now I could hear Mother and Dad stirring around in their room.

  My nose was flat to screen wire. “GET OFF MY PLACE,” Mrs. Dowdel bellowed, “and take these . . . sopranos with you. Trumpets, strumpets—everybody out.”

  More shoe-scuffling came from the porch, and the peck of high heels. A sob and some squealing. The gospel quartette milled.

  “You’ve rented your last rooms in this town, you two-faced old goat,” Mrs. Dowdel thundered. The whole town was wide-awake now. “Hit the road.”

  “Dad-burn it, Mrs. Dowdel,” the Texas Tornado whined, “we done paid you out for the whole week with ready money. Cash on the barrelhead.”

  “I’m about a squat jump away from a loaded Winchester 21,” Mrs. Dowdel replied, “and I’m tetchy as a bull in fly time.”

  She turned back against a tide of sopranos and stalked into her house. Whether she was going for her gun or to bed nobody could know. The figures milled some more. A suitcase came open. But then they started for the road. A big Lincoln Continental was parked out there, washed by moonbeams. Doors banged, and the Lincoln gunned away, shaking off the dust of this town.

  A room away, Mother sighed.

  Then silence fell upon the listening town, and the moon slid behind a cloud. Somewhere farther out in the fields a swooping owl pounced on squealing mice. But they were faint squeaks, and far-off.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Boy Next Door

  Dad and I had to keep wringing out our shirts all that next day. It was a hundred in the shade, hotter inside the church. He sent me home early.

  As I came past the park, they were already taking down the big revival tent—folding the tent and stealing away. They’d only managed to pass the collection plate that first night, thanks to Mrs. Dowdel. Now the Texas Tornado was having to touch down somewhere else.

  People may have hated to miss the rest of revival week. But telling each other how Gypsy Piggott was chased off was interesting and some consolation. I never knew anyplace where news traveled faster. It wasn’t as slow a town as it looked.

  The sidewalk along the main street petered out before it came to our house. I walked out in the road with the hot concrete eating through my sneaker soles. I expect my mind wandered. It did that a lot. I remember starting to reach down and pick up a Fuller Brush on the side of the road.

  Right about then I knew I wasn’t alone. They came up behind me before I could think. Somebody walked up my sneaker heels. A big bruiser was suddenly on each side of me, and more of them behind.

  It was the gang of big uglies who headed out this way every afternoon. Fear trickled down my spine.

  A big thorny hand slipped under each one of my armpits.

  “Just keep right on a-walkin’,” a weirdly soft voice said far above my head. But now my feet barely grazed ground. “Just step right along, preacher’s kid.”

  We were passing our house now, and where was my m—

  “You smell funny, preacher’s kid,” said another voice from on high. And he should talk. “What’s that you smell like?”

  “Shellac,” I said in a puny voice. “I been shellacking a pew.”

  “Pew. You can say that again,” said another voice, and they all did a lot of hee-haw laughing. We must have sounded like quite a friendly bunch. But who was there to hear? We were only a ditch away from Mrs. Dowdel’s yard. Was this the first time all August she hadn’t been out, working her garden?

  “You need to clean up and cool off, preacher’s kid,” came a voice. “You stink, and you’re sweatin’, bad. You ever been to the crick?”

  I said nothing till a hand slapped the back of my head. “No.”

  It was open country now. We were off the slab and tramping the shimmering oiled road. Not a car on it. Not a farmer in a field. I hung between two huge hulks as the town fell away behind us. They both wore yellow steel-toed construction boots. I was just a dropkick away from being booted over the next woven-wire fence. Some big bird wheeled over us. A buzzard? A vulture?

  We tramped a mile, easy. Then we were over the ditch, deep in milkwort and goldenrod. You could smell the crick before we got to the cattails and the trees. I smell it yet, slow water and pond scum and rotten logs. The smell of August, 1958.

  Willows wept into the water, and I wanted to. The skeleton of an old snub-nosed rowboat was half buried in the bank. They turned me loose, and I chanced a look up at their main man. He was six foot tall. His sideburns were down to his jaw. And there was something wrong with his eyes. Now I was scared.

  “Skin off them clothes,” he said. “Every stitch.” Now I was really scared.

  But they were all skinning off their clothes. Work shirts, jeans, a carpenter’s apron, boots. Tree limbs filled up with blue denim and army surplus.

  Then a giant hee-haw went up. “Underwear? Preacher’s kid wears underwear? Whoooeey. Got lace on it? Git it off.”

  They sure weren’t wearing any underwear. I had to notice, because they were so tall I only came up to their—

  “Can you swim, preacher’s kid?” said the tall galoot with the scary eyes.

  What was the right answer? Yes? No?

  “A little.”

  That’s when I noticed they’d brought fishing line. Ten-pound fishing line, coiled in the weeds. But where were the poles? Where was the bucket of bait?

  * * *

  The next thing I knew I was in brown water. My nose up, then under, then up, sucking air hard. I was doing my best in that whirlpooly bend in the crick where I was just out of my depth. I was kicking hard, but that’s about all I could manage with both hands tied tight behind me with fishing line. I could have used web feet. They’d thrown me pretty far out too.

  But you’d be surprised how much swimming you can do with your hands tied behind you. Swimming and drowning. Four or five of the better-natured ones cheered me on from the bank. But I was going in circles, getting lower in the water.

  Then with big splashes they were all in the crick, and they weren’t out of their depth. They were neck and shoulders above the greasy water, batting me back and forth from one of them to the other. Back and forth.

  * * *

  We came back to town across country, quicker than the road. The fields were stubbly, but they let me keep my Keds. They even put them on for me and laced them up because I was still tied tight. The sneakers were all I kept. My shirt and jeans were missing, and of course the underpants had to go.

  The rest of them were dressed, and cool as cucumbers after their dip in the crick. But what could I say? Nothing actually, because they’d also brought a roll of duct tape. A big patch of it was plastered over my mouth.

  The trees and roofs of town rose ahead of us. I remember our long shadows rippling across the furrowed fields. Six or eight overgrown galoots and me like a piglet on a spit, hanging from two of their big, thorny mitts. They swung me over fences, and I barely cleared barbed wire. And I mean barely. The closer to town, the nakeder I felt.

  They still might kill me. Though they’d gone to the trouble of hoisting me by my heels on the crick bank and shaking a gallon of brown water out of me. But they could be saving me for later.

  The sun hung in the sky behind us. The day went on forever.

  The nearer to town, the quieter the gang got. They weren’t that chatty anyway. In fact they only seemed to know a couple verbs. We were coming through orchards and now a melon patch. Through a stand of hollyhocks I saw the back of the last house in town, Mrs. Dowdel’s. Then ours next door and our car parked around back. I was that close to ho
me and this close to crying. But it’s almost impossible to cry with your mouth taped shut. And you sure don’t want your nose stopping up.

  We were behind Mrs. Dowdel’s property. The Japanese lantern vine growing over her privy rattled quietly. We were quieter.

  “Preacher’s kid,” the biggest galoot sighed down in my ear, “what you’ve just had is a welcome to the community. It’s our way of sayin’ howdy. Now we’re goin’ to leave you in the hands of one of our solid citizens. But she ain’t as friendly as us. She don’t like nobody.”

  What?

  What did this mean?

  What was going to happen to me now?

  Most of the gang melted away. Two of them swung me into Mrs. Dowdel’s privy.

  Then they went to work. I’ll say this for them: They were artists with fishing line. They strung a giant spider’s web that ran from rafters to loose floorboards. Then they tied me in the center, bound hand and foot and still gagged. I hung like a ham in a smokehouse just over the hole in the well-worn seat.

  “Keep us in your prayers, preacher’s kid,” said the big one, eerie and soft.

  Then they were gone. I was alone. This was about as alone as I’d ever been. Time passed, lots of it. Dimming light fell through the chinks of the privy and the half-moon carved in the door. The smell in here was truly bad. I swayed slightly in my web and tried to take a positive view of the situation. I couldn’t. For one thing, my knees were higher than my ears.

  * * *

  It must be midnight, though daylight still came through the cracks. Maybe it was the next day? I sure would have liked to scratch my nose. But here was one good thing: They’d hung me right over the privy hole.

  My mind wandered as it often did. I may have nodded off. My feet were sound asleep. Then the privy door banged open.

  Filling the doorway and then some was Mrs. Dowdel. A copy of the Farm Journal and three corncobs were in one of her fists. I hadn’t seen her up close. I’d never wanted to be anywhere near this close to her. Her specs crept to the end of her nose. We were nose to nose.

  She didn’t welcome surprises, and I came as one. All she’d wanted to do was use her privy, and here I was barring her way, naked as a jaybird in my own personal web.

  Her old pink-rimmed eyes grew larger than her specs. She poked them back up the bridge of her nose and worked some of her chins with her free hand. I swayed. She looked my web over, up to the rafters, down to the floor. She may have admired the knots.

  “Well I’ll be a ring-tailed monkey if that don’t about take the cake,” she remarked. “And I thought I’d seen everything.” I made a small sound.

  She dumped her corncobs and the Farm Journal, and ripped the duct tape off my mouth.

  “Yeoww!” I hollered.

  “Had to be done,” she said. “Who did you say you was?”

  I coughed up something—maybe a tadpole. “I’m Bob Barnhart. The boy next door.”

  “Well, I can see you ain’t the girl,” said Mrs. Dowdel.

  * * *

  Over in her cobhouse hung a pair of shears for trimming the snowball bushes. Mrs. Dowdel had them in both hands now, whacking at fishing line just over my head. Sharp blades flashed. Three more whacks, and I dropped onto the worn-smooth privy seat, over the hole. She bent my head forward and reached down my back to cut my wrists loose. I couldn’t feel the ends of my fingers till the next Wednesday. She hunkered down with a grunt and cut my ankles free.

  “Hoo-boy,” she said, “I don’t truss up my Christmas turkey that tight.” She wound the fishing line into a ball, since she seemed to save everything. Now without my fishing line I was nakeder than before.

  “Keep your seat,” she said, and went back to her cobhouse. There was a world of tools and implements in there. A bunch of rusty rabbit traps hung on the outside wall. She rummaged around and came back with an old tarp, stiff with dried paint. She dropped it over me to cover me up. I edged off the seat, stood up, and fell in a heap of tarp on the privy floor. The blood wasn’t getting to my feet yet.

  “Stir them stumps and try your trotters.” Mrs. Dowdel started up her back walk. “Trail me up to the house.”

  So I wobbled behind her up her back walk. In the tarp I must have looked like a pup tent in sneakers. It gapped in the back. I could feel breeze all the way down.

  Sunlight still flooded her kitchen. The wall clock read a quarter to five. I hadn’t been in the privy as long as it seemed. A big black Monarch iron range hulked along one wall. She’d never taken down a calendar. One of them read:

  EVERY GOOD WISH FOR

  BRIGHTER DAYS IN 1933

  Mrs. Dowdel was bigger with walls around her and a ceiling. Her apron was full of bulging pockets.

  She was a walking Woolworth’s: a narrow-nosed handsaw, a claw hammer, clothespins, and now a ball of fishing line.

  “Trail me upstairs,” she mentioned. “Don’t trip on your tarp.”

  She pulled herself up a long, shadowy flight of linoleum stairs. I followed. She wore giant felt shoes with one button straining over the foot.

  At the top of the stairs she elbowed a door open. In there dusty west light filtered through darned curtains. The windowsill was a wasp graveyard. An ancient brass bed angled out of a corner. The mattress looked like it was stuffed with cornhusks. A darker triangle showed on the wallpaper where a pennant had hung.

  Mrs. Dowdel turned to a big chest and found what she was looking for: a shirt for a bigger boy than I was. It was kind of old-timey, but I hadn’t come here to argue. It was faded out, but then so were my own four shirts. Three now. Out of the drawer she drew a pair of old dungarees.

  “These is about the smallest I’ve got.” She turned away to the window.

  I dropped my tarp. “As to underwear,” she said over her shoulder, “the only pair that comes to mind was Dowdel’s, my late husband. And they’d be a hundred percent wool with buttons before and a trapdoor behind.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, “ma’am.”

  The shirt had been striped at one time, but it smelled starchy and clean. I could turn up the dungaree legs, but the waist was on the wide side.

  Mrs. Dowdel turned my way. The gold light pouring around her shadowed her face. But I saw right there she was somebody else. Her old hand stole up to her mouth.

  She turned aside, and there was glitter behind her glasses. “Last boy wore them togs,” she said, “was my grandson, Joey. That’s been pretty nearly twenty-five years back. He’s all growed. Don’t ask me why I kept his stuff, except I keep everything. You never know.”

  She blinked and saw I was holding up the pants. “Lemme see what we’ve got for a belt.” She inventoried her apron and came up with the ball of fishing line. Unwinding a shorter length, she handed it over, and I tied it around me.

  “You better skin home,” she said. “They may not have missed you yet. You can grow into them clothes. Do you for school.”

  I turned to go, ready to thank her.

  “Hold it,” she said, and I froze. “Who done it?”

  I teetered on the doorsill in this other boy’s clothes. “If I tell, I expect they’ll kill me.”

  Mrs. Dowdel shrugged. “They may kill you anyhow.”

  So I admitted it was the bunch that headed out to the crick every afternoon. “Their leader’s older than a kid.”

  “One blue eye and one green eye?” Mrs. Dowdel inquired. That was it. That’s what was funny and scary about his eyes.

  “That’d be Roscoe Burdick. He’s Mildred’s boy, and bound to be right at twenty years old. I don’t know what he’s still doing around these parts. At his age, most Burdicks is on the chain gang.”

  She gazed away, recalling everybody’s family history. No secrets around here.

  “As for the rest of the bunch,” she said, “they’re all Cowgills—Ernie’s boys—and Flukes—Augie’s boys—and Leapers—Elmo’s boys. All dumber than stumps. Them families never was worth a toot. Not all varmints is four-legged. That bunch is the
same ones who shot out all the windows in your church building.”

  “Do they go to school?” Suddenly I was looking ahead, into the terrible future.

  “Now and again, some of them,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Not Roscoe naturally. They’s teachers younger than him. He spent so many years in first grade, they named the desk for him.”

  Now I was looking ahead to going home, and my eyes were stinging. Last year, back in Terre Haute, when I was still a kid, I’d have gone home bawling. Now I didn’t want to. And I never wanted anybody to know how Mrs. Dowdel found me in her privy. Ever.

  She seemed to read my mind, or something. “I expect you can get by in that outfit till you’re up in your room and into your own togs. I wouldn’t worry your folks if I was you. The way I hear it, they have troubles of their own. Anyhow, they’d just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn’t they?”

  That’s exactly what they’d tell me. It had to do with loving your enemies.

  “Trouble is,” Mrs. Dowdel observed, “after you’ve turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.”

  I couldn’t figure out how to thank her. She was pointing me out of her grandson’s room. Joey’s. “I’ve got me a spare jar of apple butter,” she said. “And I baked today. You can take a loaf to your maw. Tell her you found it on the porch.”

  She was wheezing down the stairs behind me. The house shook. If she fell on me I was a goner. “And don’t look for anything out of the law around here,” she said. “The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It’s every man for hisself.”

  I felt the town tighten around my throat.

  “But as the saying goes, if you can’t get justice,” Mrs. Dowdel remarked, “get even.”

  * * *

  She kept right after me all the way down to the one-hinged kitchen door. Outside, the garden and the cannas were still as an oil painting. The sinking sun was fire-red in all our side windows. Tools clanked in Mrs. Dowdel’s apron pockets.

  In my puniest voice I said, “You won’t say anything about how you found—”

  “Never set eyes on you in my life,” she said, locking the screen door behind me.