A Season of Gifts Read online

  “Close that door,” Phyllis whispered at me. “What are you doing up at this—”

  “The whole town’s up,” I whispered back. “Big doings in the melon patch. Haunts, gunfire, sorority girls, the law. You can’t hear yourself think. We thought you went to bed early.”

  “I did,” Phyllis said, somewhat shifty. “Then I got up and . . . went on a hayride.”

  “I thought the Future Farmers hayride was next weekend.”

  “It is,” Phyllis whispered, not looking me in the eye.

  There were little bits of straw and hay all over her, from her barrettes to her penny loafers. Her rolled-up jeans were dusty with chaff.

  “Mother and Dad didn’t know you sneaked out,” I accused.

  “I didn’t sneak out,” she said. “I left quietly. I’m fourteen. I have a life to live. In many important ways I’m practically twenty.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And clear out of my room,” Phyllis whispered. It loomed pink around us. “Ruth Ann will wake up, and it’ll be your fault.”

  We glanced across the pink stripe to Ruth Ann’s side. She was this little mound in the bed, snoring lightly, with one small hand on top of the covers. A drying hollyhock doll nestled by her chin.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Phyllis murmured, “what are those feathers doing all around her bed? It looks like a pheasant flew in here and blew up.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Fuss and Feathers

  The town was all eyes and ears, and the countryside heard all about it. The Kickapoo Princess had gone overnight from rumor to sure thing. Being high school girls, the witnesses weren’t reliable. But there was a bunch of them, and they sang like canaries.

  It was a story that had everything: ghosts, gunplay, and Civil Defense.

  WHAT’S GOING ON IN A RURAL

  PIATT COUNTY MELON PATCH?

  a headline in the Champaign Courier inquired.

  ARE OUR DISTANT EARLY WARNING DEFENSE SYSTEMS ENOUGH?

  People who couldn’t find us on a map beat a path to our door. Traffic backed up, and the newspapers of Arcola, Sullivan, and DeWitt County sent reporters.

  Woody’s Zephyr Oil filling station pumped gas around the clock. The Dairy Queen took on extra help and was talking about putting in a drive-through. A lot of money changed hands.

  Barbara Jean Jeeter’s mother kept her out of school for a week, saying she had a beast of a cold and possibly bronchitis.

  To cash in, Mrs. Dowdel had set up shop out at the front of her property. It was a roadside stand featuring her jars of corn relish and apple butter and everything else out of her storm cellar. Piles of jars stood on hay bales, though she had no hay to bale. There were big bunches of bittersweet tied with fishing line. Shocks of Indian corn rose out of pumpkin piles. A few gawky dolls made out of cornhusks and yarn, with walnuts for faces.

  A sign over a mountain of watermelon and mushmelon read:

  PRODUCE FROM THE HAUNTED PATCH YOU PLUG ’EM YOU BOUGHT ’EM

  Coffee cans held displays of pheasant feathers:

  AUTHENTIC KICKAPOO HEADDRESS FEATHERS 5¢ APIECE 3 FOR A DIME

  Mrs. Dowdel’s prices were steep, but she was making money hand over fist. Also, she was unusually chatty to reporters who wanted to interview her, though they had to buy a gallon jug of soft cider or a peck of peaches first.

  You could hear her from our house, bending the reporters’ ears. “Pshaw, if you’re after a story, go down to the southern part of the state, down there at Cahokia. I know it’s the rough end of creation, but the old prehistoric people buried their folks in mounds down there. A good many has been dug up and put on display. Bones, of course. Go on down there and don’t bother me,” she’d say, and keep the change.

  A small figure joined her after school, waiting on trade and darting back and forth for more gourds off the haunted vine at a dime apiece, a quarter for three. It was Ruth Ann in a cut-down version of Mrs. Dowdel’s feedsack apron, with pockets.

  Mother kind of gave up and said, “At least I know where she is, and she doesn’t have to cross a busy street.” To work on his sermons, Dad had to move up in the attic. The traffic was deafening, and cars parked in our front yard.

  Ruth Ann only came home in time for supper, bobbing through the cannas in an apron that brushed her sandals. She never came home empty-handed. She’d bring a mess of tomatoes too bruised to sell. Or a long-necked squash Mother could fry in butter. Now Ruth Ann was tying up her braids at the back of her head, since most of Mrs. Dowdel’s hair was drawn back in a big bun. Ruth Ann carried a corn dolly in her apron pocket now that the hollyhocks were over. If you asked me, she was turning into a Mrs. Dowdel doll herself.

  Mother tried to have little talks with her. “Honey, you’re a good little helper, bless your heart, but try to remember Mrs. Dowdel is old and can get confused in the things she says.”

  “Pshaw,” Ruth Ann would say back, “this whole town is built where two old Indian trails crossed. The Kickapoos goin’ one way, the Illini the other. Hoo-boy, no wonder they’s restless spirits underfoot.” Then she’d poke at the bridge of her nose like she wore spectacles.

  Mother sighed.

  Mrs. Dowdel turned a tidy profit. Her apron got so saggy with loose change that she had to hang a berry pail from an army surplus ammo belt slung around her big middle.

  * * *

  Another rumor began to drift through town, lazy like the smoke off the burning leaves. You could probably have traced it back to Mrs. Dowdel herself. It was common knowledge that she didn’t trust banks, especially the Weidenbachs’ bank uptown. Still, she was spotted at the teller’s counter, picking up those papers you roll piles of quarters in. The bank gave them out free.

  She was said to have folding money in stacks too—stacks and stacks. The exact amount grew in the telling. Her front room light burned late as she sat counting it, several said. Rumor reported that she was stashing her treasure somewhere in her house. A loose floorboard in her grandson’s old bedroom was mentioned. Joey’s room. But witnesses were on the record that she’d been digging out in her melon patch in the darkest part of night. Who knew?

  * * *

  Finally Mrs. Dowdel had sold every melon and squash in her patch, every gourd off her vine. And all at top dollar. Her tomato plants were picked clean and ready to be dug under. The pheasant feathers had sold like hot cakes. They’d flown out of those coffee cans.

  She’d feathered her nest for sure. Now you’d think she’d be hunkering down for winter and maybe paying to have her kindling split. But no.

  She turned up at our kitchen door one night. A heavy clump on the porch, a thundering rap on the door, and there she was. From the table we saw the two moons of her specs agleam in the gloom. We jumped.

  Supper was just over, and Phyllis was plotting her escape. Ruth Ann went to open the door, and we followed. Then we saw she wasn’t alone. An eerie face under a mashed hat peered around her. Cross-eyes peered at us and everywhere else, through a veil. It was Mrs. Wilcox of the wash-foot church.

  Mrs. Dowdel leaned toward Mother and muttered, “I couldn’t shake her.” She jerked a thumb to indicate Mrs. Wilcox. “She’s all over me like a rubber girdle in a heatwave.”

  “Oh, but you’re both as welcome as you can be,” Mother said. “Come in and take chairs.”

  But that wasn’t going to happen. They came in, though, single-file. They were paying a call, so they had on their best aprons, with rickrack. Mrs. Wilcox’s eyes and teeth went in every direction. Something bulky hung in the crook of Mrs. Dowdel’s arm. Not her Winchester. It was a box, a little bigger than a shoebox.

  Phyllis held back, trying not to be there. Ruth Ann and I were the only ones who’d seen Mrs. Dowdel this close, and I wasn’t admitting it. But she looked straight over my head like she’d never set eyes on me in her life. Ruth Ann’s apron was just like hers and Mrs. Wilcox’s. Phyllis was drifting farther off.

  “I don’t neighbor,” Mrs. Dowdel announced, t
hough she was handing Mother her last jar of pickled peaches.

  “She don’t,” Mrs. Wilcox piped up.

  “I’m here strictly on church business.”

  “Strictly business,” Mrs. Wilcox echoed. “And no funny business.”

  Mrs. Dowdel turned on Dad, who was fighting his way into his suit coat. “You can’t get a church up and goin’ without a good funeral first,” she told him. “Any fool could tell you that. Without a funeral, you ain’t got a chance in—”

  “The world,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “I haven’t missed a funeral since the great flu epidemic. A good funeral makes the whole week go better.”

  “I want me one,” Mrs. Dowdel said.

  A grave silence fell over us. Was she talking about her own funeral? Was she . . . planning ahead? Dad looked lost.

  “And the . . . departed?” he asked, feeling his way.

  “Oh well, shoot,” Mrs. Dowdel said—expostulated. “I brought her with me.”

  Did she mean Mrs. Wilcox? Mrs. Wilcox stood there in Mrs. Dowdel’s big shadow. A toothpick wavered out between two of her teeth. She didn’t look ready to depart, quite.

  But Mrs. Dowdel was sliding the box out of the crook of her arm. It was wrapped up in a piece of old rug or an Indian blanket, something ragged and sewed together with thongs. It was roped around, and there was some beadwork stuck on.

  “I’m sick to death of all this fussin’ and fumin’ about restless spirits and floatin’ princesses and all such horse—”

  “Feathers,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “That’s right. Mrs. Dowdel’s fixin’ to get down to the end of her rope. And you don’t want to rile her. She’s about a squat jump away from—”

  “I’ll tell it, Effie,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “I’m up to here with juvenile delinquent sorority gals and riffraff from out of town trampin’ my property like they own it. This used to be a nice quiet little town. Now look at it.”

  “Just look,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

  “Ah,” Dad said.

  “So I dug her up,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “That so-called Kickapoo Princess, and here she is.”

  She handed the box over, and it was in Dad’s hands before he knew it. We stood there stunned. Mother went snow white. Phyllis just went. Ruth Ann was all eyes. She poked at the bridge of her nose like she was wearing spectacles.

  “This is all I could find of her, and it’s not much more than eye-teeth and gristle. But then, she’d been pushing up my melons for a good many years,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “She wasn’t nothin’ but a bag of bones even before I was born. And I’m old as dirt.”

  “Older,” Mrs. Wilcox murmured.

  “I want a good church funeral for her so the public will know she’s not adrift around the back of my place. And I want her buried out in the cemetery along with everybody else.”

  She was turning to go now and shooing Mrs. Wilcox to the door. “Do your best, Preacher,” she said over her massive shoulder. “And do it up big. I’ll get the word out. You get the lead out.”

  Then they were gone.

  “Night now!” Mrs. Wilcox called back out of the evening. Dad stood there with all that remained of the Kickapoo Princess.

  “I’m not a showman, Ellen,” he said at last to Mother. “I’m no Gypsy Piggott. It sounds like they won’t want a funeral. They’ll want a show.”

  “You’ll know what to do, Jack,” Mother said. “You’ll rise to the occasion. This may just be a heaven-sent opportunity for you.”

  She looked fairly sure, though it was hard to picture Mrs. Dowdel as a messenger from heaven. But Mother may already have been thinking about sheet music and a choir. She’d met Dad when she was in the choir and he was in his first pulpit. You could almost hear hymns humming in her head.

  Dad jiggled the box. The label on the blanket around it read:

  MADE IN THE USA

  PENDLETON, OREGON

  “I don’t think there’s much of anything in this box,” Dad said. “Or anybody.”

  “Maybe she’s there in spirit,” Mother said.

  “Or maybe Mrs. Dowdel dreamed her up out of thin air,” Dad said. “I’m not sure the truth is always in her.”

  But then they both noticed Ruth Ann right below them, all ears and as innocent as if she’d never worn a feathered headdress in all her six years.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Indian Summer

  We laid the Kickapoo Princess to rest the Saturday before high school homecoming. It was a brilliant fall day with the sumac running riot in the hedgerows. Indian summer, in fact.

  In a pinch we could pack forty people into the pews.

  By mid-morning upward of two hundred people were standing outside. A press tent rose in the park. WGN from Chicago was broadcasting on live radio what they called The Final Rites of the Piatt County Pocahontas.

  Mother was already at church. She’d called for a choir practice on Wednesday night, and eighty people turned out, though she could only field fourteen. Now people from Casner to Lovington remembered they were Methodists and came in waves. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see them marching across the fields, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  As the clock ticked toward two, Dad and I stood on our porch. His hand was on my shoulder, which I liked. Cars and trucks were parked past us out to Salt Crick. It was the first time I ever saw Dad wear his robe with the velvet down the front. There was a whiff of mothballs about him, and his upper lip was beady with sweat. This might have been when I first noticed it wasn’t that easy being a grown-up.

  “‘I make myself a slave to everyone,’” he remarked, “‘to win as many as possible.’”

  “That’s Scripture,” I said to him. “Am I right, Dad?”

  “I Corinthians. 9:19,” he said.

  “Dad, am I going to have to be a minister when I grow up?”

  “If you hear the Call, you’ll have to answer it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  But then Dad said, thoughtful and far-off, “Or you may just want to let it ring.”

  * * *

  Now Mrs. Dowdel was coming across her yard. Mrs. Wilcox and Ruth Ann bobbed behind, all aproned, all making for church. A fully feathered pheasant, stuffed, rode the front of Mrs. Dowdel’s hat.

  “Right nice day for a funeral,” Mrs. Wilcox called over to us. “God’s smilin’.”

  “He may be laughing out loud,” Dad said, under his breath.

  Mrs. Dowdel glanced over and seemed to see me for the first time in her life. “That your boy, Preacher?”

  “It is,” Dad called back. “And I believe that’s one of my daughters trailing you.”

  Ruth Ann waved as onward they trooped, single-file into the gathering crowd.

  In the distance the high school band started down the main street from the other way, playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in march time. The glitter on the majorettes’ batons winked in the sun.

  Dad squeezed my shoulder, here in this last moment.

  I’d already been down to the church an hour before, trying to usher. But people had kept knocking me over to get in the pews. Mrs. Weidenbach had roped off an entire pew for the Daughters of the American Revolution, and she’d brought her own rope.

  There were plenty of United Brethren there too, and everybody else. Wash-foot. Sprinklers and dunkers. Even some Amish over from Arthur in buggies. The Shellabarger sisters were sighted, Miss Cora and Miss Flora, and people said that Miss Cora hadn’t been off their porch since before the Korean Police Action.

  Dad and I turned up the street through the bright, swirling leaves. Switchy-tailed squirrels peered down from high branches to the heads below. The Veterans of Foreign Wars were selling pulled pork sandwiches out of a truck bed. The crowds parted, and everybody noticed Dad’s robe. Up the rickety church steps we went, Dad and I.

  The Methodist Women’s Circle had placed the princess’s box on a draped table below the pulpit. Around it was an artistic arrangement of fall leaves and asters. People had brought various souvenirs f
rom trips out west on Route 66: clay pottery, sweetgrass baskets, toy totem poles, calabashes, two tomahawks.

  Mrs. Dowdel had already elbowed three Daughters of the American Revolution out of the front pew to make room for herself, Mrs. Wilcox, and Ruth Ann.

  The color guard of the American Legion pushed in past Dad and me. They were in their spit-and-polish blue with gold braid, bearing two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the State of Illinois.

  The high school band members worked in behind them. In fact the whole high school, though I didn’t see Phyllis. There were some notes clenched in Dad’s hand as he started down the aisle. Mother’s choir broke into “Once to Every Man and Nation Comes the Moment to Decide.” All the plastic in the windows had blown out. Gold autumn light poured in, and a few bright leaves.

  Dad turned at the front. He didn’t climb up into the pulpit and put himself above the rest of us. As Mother often pointed out, he was modest to a fault.

  Behind me a television camera from WSOY rolled in. Dad saw that. He pointed at the camera crew and in a ringing voice said, “Take that thing out of here. This is a place of worship.” The crew fell back, and the congregation stirred. Dad looked somewhat surprised at himself.

  There was sudden silence except for the wasps in the eaves.

  “‘Open your eyes and look at the fields!’” Dad intoned. “‘They are ripe for harvest.’”

  Mrs. Dowdel spoke up from the front pew. “John. 4:35.”

  The congregation craned and murmured. They’d never seen her in church.

  Dad looked down at the table. Beside the princess’s box was a piece of painted pottery, maybe ancient, probably not.

  Dad held it up. “‘We are the clay,’” he said, looking to heaven through the breaks in the roof. “‘You are the potter.’”

  “Isaiah. 64:8,” Mrs. Dowdel responded.

  “We’re here to remember those who came before us,” Dad said in his regular voice. “The stewards of this land that now we till, the place where we make our homes and build our lives and hold our children in our arms.”