A Year Down Yonder Read online

  You’d think they’d cut and run back the way they came. But no. They trampled the fallen boy and hit the back fence running. He came up in a painful crouch and crippled after them. He went over the fence, and his big, galooty legs waved in the night air. Then he lit on the other side, again face first from the sound of it.

  Silence fell. So much had happened in so short a time. Bootsie vanished from my lap. I joined Grandma. A wreath of steam rose from her heavy breathing into the hazy night. The walk was littered with things that seemed to have fallen off the Halloweeners.

  Grandma bent down and fetched up a knife. She switched it open, and the blade gleamed. By the light of the ringed moon she read out the initials carved in its handle. “There’s an A and an F and a J and an R,” she read, squinting. “Do tell.”

  It was the kind of knife a boy likes, and Grandma approved of it too. She closed the blade and stuffed it in her pocket. “And looky there.” It was a narrow-nosed handsaw, useful for sawing through a privy’s posts, handy to carry. “That cost good money,” she said, collecting it. We found a sack still half full of flour, abandoned by the walk. It was flour for mixing with water to mess on porches, and maybe cats. “That’ll do for our pies,” she said, so I gathered it up.

  “I’ll leave this wire stretched till morning. Watch your step on the way to the house,” Grandma said. “I’ll be along in a little while.”

  She meant she was going to use her privy, and she spoke with some satisfaction because it was still there to use.

  At school the next morning, we were short of boys. Of course we’d been short of boys all along—only six or eight. And there were seventeen of us girls. But even when I counted in both rooms that morning, I only came up with three—Elmo Leaper and the two Johnson brothers. And they weren’t town boys. They were country boys—boots and bib overalls.

  Nobody mentioned the absentees. At least nobody mentioned them to me. But like Grandma herself, I wasn’t the first one people ran to with news.

  Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city. Except for Ina-Rae Gage, they were all giving me a wide berth. The leader of the girls was clearly Carleen Lovejoy, the grain dealer’s daughter. She was about as stuck-up as she could be, in the circumstances. If she bothered to notice me at all, it was to wonder if I’d last. I was still spending my school days on the sidelines.

  That night Grandma could hardly get through her chores for her haste. The only hot water we had came from the reservoir in the black iron stove. We dipped water out to do the dishes in two pans on the kitchen table, one of suds, one to rinse. She washed, I dried, and she was rushing me.

  “Grandma, where are we going?”

  “To pay a call on Old Man Nyquist.”

  This town was full of people with one foot in the grave, if you asked me. “Grandma, is he real old?”

  “Old as dirt,” she said, “and deaf as an adder.”

  I sighed. “What am I supposed to say to him?”

  “Nothin’, if you’re lucky,” she replied.

  So we were up to something.

  Grandma and I were soon outdoors, bundled against the brisk night. I was pulling a little old red wagon from out of the cobhouse. You could find just about anything in the cobhouse. The wagon had been Dad’s when he was a boy. Onward we went, kicking through the leaves. We might have been any grandma and her granddaughter, out for an evening stroll. But we weren’t. We were Grandma Dowdel and me.

  Old Man Nyquist was a farmer retired to town. He lived a street or two back from the Wabash tracks in a house on a corner lot. There was a barn behind. Not a light showed on his property. “He goes to bed with the chickens,” Grandma remarked. But she looked hard at the house to make sure.

  “What are we supposed to do, Grandma? Wake him up?”

  “We’re supposed not to.”

  Now we were in his big yard. Grandma looked up at a tree with a high canopy of foliage. She scanned the ground around it. “The old tightwad,” she mumbled. “The old cheapskate.” And she must have meant Old Man Nyquist.

  “That’s a pecan tree,” she said. “Them’s pecans.” She pointed to the ground, but I couldn’t see many. But then moonlight doesn’t show everything, and a lot of leaves were down. “The old rapscallion said I could have any that had fallen. He knew there wasn’t enough for a six-inch pie. I had an idea he was pulling my leg, the old ...” But she was drawing out two gunnysacks from the folds of her coat, an old one of Grandpa Dowdel’s. “Well, let’s get what we can.”

  We bent double and worked the yard. “Be careful what you pick up,” Grandma warned. “Not everything in a yard’s a pecan. He keeps a dog.”

  It was dim, hard work. It took me forever to find a handful of pecans, and we were picking clean. Grandma was doing no better. She stood and ran a hand down her aching back. Her gaze fell on Old Man Nyquist’s barn. A tractor stood just inside the open door. I guess he used it as a car after he retired to town. Grandma seemed to consider it.

  She handed her gunnysack to me. Between us, we didn’t have enough pecans for a tart. “If trouble breaks out,” she muttered, “cut and run.”

  I stood rooted to the spot while Grandma drifted toward the barn, keeping the house in her sights.

  The barn stood in its own shadow. Oil drums and chicken crates and bald tires leaned against it. Grandma stood in the moonlight. She rolled an old tractor tire off the heap. Hitching it under her arm, she advanced on the barn door. The nose of the old Massey-Ferguson tractor stuck out. She hung the tire from its radiator cap.

  I was transfixed. I couldn’t think a moment ahead. Now she was half swallowed by the darkness of the barn door. Then swallowed.

  I stood like a sculpture in the yard. An ear-splitting explosion rocked the night. The tractor roared to life, coughing and gunning. Old Man Nyquist’s dog shot out from under the porch, yelping, and chased himself all over the yard. The tractor lurched forward, gathering speed. As it crossed the moonlit yard, there was Grandma up in the tractor seat, white-headed and high. She could start it, but could she stop it?

  The pecan tree stopped it.

  Grandma, who didn’t know how to drive an automobile, aimed at the tree and hit it dead on, ramming it with the tire over the radiator. The tree reeled in shock, and pecans rained. It was a good thing I wasn’t standing under it. A ton of pecans fell together, like a hailstorm. When the tractor hit bark, it bounced back and the engine died. Grandma’s head snapped back, but she was still riding it. Now she was climbing down.

  She loomed up at me and reached for a gunnysack. “Grandma, did Old Man Nyquist sleep through that?”

  “Who knows?” she said. “Work fast.”

  We were ankle-deep in pecans. “Like shootin’ fish in a barrel,” Grandma said. I scooped them up with one eye on the house. An old codger appearing on the porch with blood in his eye wouldn’t have surprised me. “Keep at it,” Grandma said. “He’d light a light first. We’d have a head start.”

  Finally I had so many pecans, I couldn’t lift the sack. Somehow we got them into Dad’s little red wagon. I was desperate to get away from there. Grandma had to hurry to keep up with me as I yanked the wagon around the corner and down the street. My heart thumped, and I wouldn’t look back. Old Man Nyquist’s dog was still yelping.

  “Grandma, you didn’t even put the tractor back in the barn.”

  “Didn’t know how to get the thing in reverse,” she said. “He’ll just think it rolled out of the barn by accident.”

  With a tire hung on its radiator. “Grandma, that wasn’t stealing, was it? I mean, in your opinion.”

  She was dumbfounded. “He said I could have any pecan that fell. And as long as we’re out and about, we might just as well go ahead and get us some punkins.”

  “Oh, Grandma,” I said. “Whose?”

  They were the Pensingers’ pumpkins. The Pensingers lived, like Grandma, in the last house on their street. We couldn’t just seem to be strolling past, giving
our pecans an airing. The street stopped in front of their house. From there on, it was just a cow path, and their pumpkin patch.

  Only one upstairs window showed a light at the Pensingers’. I made a note to put a drop of oil on the wagon’s squeaky wheels. When we came to their fence line, Grandma paused to take in the view. Behind us the town was like a little island of sighing trees and rising chimney smoke. Before us, the countryside unfolded, silvered by frost and moonlight. There the pumpkins lolled, gleaming beneath their scrubby foliage.

  Grandma reached into Grandpa Dowdel’s coat and drew forth the Halloweener’s knife with the initials in the handle. The blade sprang out, and Grandma moved among the pumpkins. She cut free two nice big ones and another, medium-sized, while I stared unblinking at the light in the Pensingers’ upstairs window. Grandma moved like a woman half her age, half her size. Somehow she balanced the pumpkins on the wagon among the pecans. I could just barely turn the wheels, but I longed for us to be somewhere else.

  We were in sight of home when I said, “Grandma, in your opinion, was taking those pumpkins steal—”

  “We’ll leave a pie on their porch,” she said. “And don’t tip them pecans out of the wagon. We’ve already picked them up once.”

  We’d barely got everything into the kitchen before she was bustling. The frost was still on those pumpkins when she laid them open with the Halloweeners’ handsaw. She was soon spooning out the seeds and strings.

  She’d worn me out, but not herself. She popped the pumpkin parts, shells up, into the oven that never cooled. And all the while, she recited a little chant, under her breath:As much punkin as cream,

  Burnt sugar in a stream,

  Three big eggs, all beat up,

  And good corn syrup, ’bout half a cup.

  She was almost dancing a hornpipe. To her, borrowed pumpkins were far sweeter than bought. Before she could tell me to start picking out the pecans, I stole away to bed.

  But before the sun of that Saturday morning was up, we were baking. The kitchen was a heady heaven of vanilla and cloves and blackstrap molasses. Grandma sifted the Halloweeners’ flour and worked it with salt and lard so I could roll out the pie crust. And she was particular about how I did it. I never had the rolling pin floured to her satisfaction. And I had to be reminded to roll the dough from the center out, and not back and forth. And exactly an eighth of an inch thick, or I had to start over.

  I don’t know how many pies we baked. And I don’t know whose hens all those eggs had come out from under. But by nightfall we had a little red wagonload of the finest pecan pies and pumpkin pies you ever saw.

  Grandma had no interest in going down to the school for the Halloween party, and said so. I looked forward to it because I expected we’d have the best refreshments of all.

  “Are you wearing a costume?” Grandma inquired.

  “Grandma, costumes are for little kids.”

  She hovered.

  Then she decided to walk me to school for safety’s sake. She was wearing her good apron with the rickrack. And I noticed the pheasant feather in her hat, which was dressy for her. I should have known that Grandma wouldn’t dream of staying home from the party.

  It was underway but limping when we got there. Carleen Lovejoy was at one end of the basement in a knot of her confederates. Gawky Gertrude Messerschmidt was one of them, and Mona Veech. Their idea of a party was to stand close and whisper. At the other end of the basement a grade-school teacher was trying to organize pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey for the little children, who were mostly ghosts and scarecrows. Between there were folding chairs for the grown-ups and old folks, under drooping twists of black and orange crepe paper.

  Grandma filled the door, and people looked up in alarm and surprise. She was famous for keeping herself to herself, but she was everywhere at once, if you asked me. We parted the party like the Red Sea, bearing in our pies.

  It was slim pickings on the refreshment table. A few popcorn balls, sticking to each other, two or three plates of fork cookies, a pan of fudge. The school board had provided a punch bowl of soft cider. Grandma cast her eyes over this bounty. “Good thing Effie Wilcox didn’t bring her angel food cake,” she observed, “or I’d have needed the handsaw to cut it.”

  She was shucking off Grandpa Dowdel’s coat and turning back her sleeves. Of course she meant to serve up her pies herself. It was her moment of glory. We’d been working toward it all along.

  Miss Butler appeared. She wore black sateen and a matching bow in her hair, which I personally thought was too perky for a teacher. “Why, Mrs. Dowdel,” she said, “how... nice.” Grandma wasn’t exactly a member of the PTA. “And what delicious-looking pies.”

  “I’ll need a stack of paper plates,” Grandma said in reply.

  Now people were lining up. Miss Butler found paper plates and throwaway forks, and two knives. Grandma and I began cutting up the pies. She could get more wedges out of a single pie than anyone I ever knew.

  Mrs. Effie Wilcox was first in line. She was either Grandma’s best friend or her worst enemy, depending on the day. And she was an unusual-looking lady. Cross-eyed, and her teeth came forth to meet you. “Well, Effie,” Grandma said, “punkin or pecan?”

  “Just a sliver of each,” Mrs. Wilcox said, looking everywhere. “I’m cuttin’ down.”

  I was shocked at how the grown-ups pushed in first. But then here came Ina-Rae Gage, who always looked so wan and drawn that I cut her an extra-wide slice of pecan.

  When she was past, Grandma muttered to me, “That’s the skinniest girl that ever I saw. She could rest in the shade of a clothesline.”

  Most of the kids from the high school jostled by. Milton Grider and Forrest Pugh, Jr., shied past Grandma. Carleen Lovejoy deigned to let me serve her, followed by her simpering group—Gertrude and Irene Stemple and Mona Veech. Our pie supply held out pretty well as half the town trooped past. Then I saw the principal, Mr. August Fluke, bringing up the rear.

  When he came even with Grandma, we beheld a fearful sight. Slumping in front of Mr. Fluke was Augie, his son. Augie was in high school with us. But you wouldn’t have known him. His head had been shaved and his scalp rubbed raw, beginning to scab. His bandaged nose was splayed all over his face. It was August Fluke, Jr., in a sorry state. Sullen too.

  My jaw dropped. That skinned-up, bald head. That nose....

  I couldn’t stand to look at him. Glancing down, I saw Grandma drop the knife she’d been using on the pies. She drew out of her apron pocket quite another knife, the one she’d found on the back walk by the privy. Somehow she managed to show the initials in its handle as she switched open the blade.

  She plunged it into a pie and cut August Fluke, Jr., a slice with his own knife. Augie’s eyes narrowed. Mr. Fluke spied his son’s knife. Then his gaze traveled up to his son’s shaved dome. How long, I wondered, had it taken all the Flukes to get the worst of the glue off Augie’s head? That was glue that stuck till kingdom come.

  Into Augie’s peeling ear, Mr. Fluke barked, “Boy, you done took on the wrong privy.”

  Augie could see that Grandma meant to keep the knife. She looked past him to his dad, saying, “Punkin or pecan?”

  To Grandma, Halloween wasn’t so much trick-or-treat as it was vittles and vengeance. Though she’d have called it justice.

  As she said later, we fed the multitudes. It was like the loaves and the fishes, with pie for all. After we’d been worked off our feet, one pie eater came back, nosing for a second piece. She was a big-boned, full-voiced lady. “Mrs. Dowdel, I declare that was the best pumpkin pie I ever put in my mouth.”

  Grandma could take compliments or leave them. “Who was that lady?” I asked her.

  “Reba Pensinger,” she said, sidelong.

  Before the evening was over, we of the younger set, except for Augie, bobbed for apples. I brought home a couple, and Grandma and I baked them with brown sugar.

  A Minute in the Morning

  I hated sleeping upstairs in that big
square room at Grandma’s. Joey wasn’t across the hall like the summers when we were kids. The mattress on the big brass bed had more craters than the moon. And you could barely see your hand in front of your face.

  In Chicago it never really got dark, not like this. And the house was too quiet, though things scuttled in the walls. Once in a while a thumping sound came from overhead in the attic. I didn’t think Grandma’s house was haunted. What ghost would dare? But she slept downstairs to spare herself the climb, so I was miles from anybody.

  What I’d have done without my radio, I don’t know. Grandma, who could hear all over the house, didn’t like extra noise, so I played the Philco at night in bed, muffled in the covers.

  With radio, you never knew. I could only pick up the Chicago stations if there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it took a crisp, clear night to bring in KMOX from St. Louis. I didn’t listen to much news. Most of it was bad. They still couldn’t find Amelia Earhart, and ten million men were out of work. I knew my dad was one of them.

  But I loved everything else on the radio. Baby Snooks. Fibber McGee and Molly. The A&P Gypsies. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Whispering Jack Smith.

  The best thing about radio was that you couldn’t see anything, so you pictured it in your mind. All the men were just as handsome as movie stars—as Tyrone Power. And all the women were as beautiful as you hoped you’d be. Their voices were who they were, and the biggest voice belonged to Kate Smith, the Songbird of the South. That fall the whole country was singing her “When the moon comes over the mountain, every beam brings a dream, dear, of you.”

  I’d lie there in the orange glow of the Philco dial, listening to the world. Then I’d see how fast I could fall asleep after I shut it off.

  By November, I was cold. Wind howled in the eaves and found every chink in the house. With the window jammed shut, there was still a stiff breeze in the room, and I could see my breath. I took to wearing my old chenille bathrobe to bed over my pajamas. I considered wearing my plaid coat too, but thought I better save something back for winter. Finally, I made the mistake of complaining to Grandma.