A Season of Gifts Page 6

  The congregation edged forward. He had a fine voice, Dad did. They could tell he was a thoughtful man, and now they heard his thoughts, about how people, families, had always lived here. How we were links in the chain.

  It wasn’t a long sermon, and the congregation stayed with him every word of the way. He hadn’t mentioned the Kickapoo Princess, the Piatt County Pocahontas. Maybe people forgot why they’d come.

  But then as he drew to a close, Dad put his hand on the princess’s box, and people stood up at the back, just to see his hand there.

  And Dad said,

  She was a child of these prairies,

  Under these blue skies above,

  And work-worn hands long forgotten

  Buried her here, with love.

  People stopped fanning themselves with the funeral home fans.

  The creatures of ditch and burrow

  Gave her pelts to keep winter out;

  The meandering streams and rivers

  Gave her drink in the times of drought.

  Her church was the sighing forest,

  Her text was the endless plain,

  Her communion the juice of the berry

  And the loaf from this Illinois grain.

  How lightly her people lived here

  In the seasons’ ebb and flow;

  May we leave this land as lovely

  When it’s our own time to go.

  A stillness stirred inside every soul within these rickety walls.

  “Amen,” Mrs. Dowdel said into the quiet. “Amen to that.” And from this golden Indian summer day, we had us a church.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Homecoming Day, and Night

  We buried the princess’s box in among the roots of a sugar maple at the edge of the cemetery. From there she’d have a view across open country to the Sangamon River bottoms.

  At the Sunday service next day it took four ushers to pass the plates along the crowded pews. And while rich old Miss Cora and Miss Flora Shellabarger didn’t attend, they sent a fifty-dollar check on the Weidenbach bank for the church roof fund.

  School was okay too, more or less. They were letting me live. But even if I hadn’t been a preacher’s kid, all the groups were already set up. Farm kids. Town kids. Then there was me. The farm kids ate at their own picnic table at lunch. But one of them turned out to be a pretty good guy. He was a big old raw-boned country boy named Jess Wood.

  He was twice my size, but he seemed to be making his first run at sixth grade. And he didn’t like bullies. One noon he happened to notice that big Newt Fluke was stealing my lunch and passing it to Elmo Leaper, Jr. They were absent a lot, but when they weren’t, I went hungry. I’d already tried grabbing my lunch back from Newt, and I’d got a fat lip out of it. And no lunch.

  On this particular noon I was already going for the apple in my desk when Jess Wood climbed off the farmers’ picnic table and ambled over.

  “Hand it back, Newt,” he said in Newt Fluke’s face.

  “Why would I do a thing like that?” Newt’s voice had changed, probably many semesters ago.

  “Because I might have a word with your leader, Roscoe Burdick.”

  At mere mention of Roscoe Burdick, Elmo Leaper, Jr., pulled back and jammed his mitts in his bib overalls. Newt was left holding the lunch. “What’s Roscoe Burdick got to do with anything?” said Newt, shifty-eyed.

  “This kid is Phyllis Barnhart’s kid brother, you wing nut,” Jess said, like it explained everything.

  Newt blinked, and my lunch seemed to grow heavy in his hand. “Who says it’s your business, rube?” he said to Jess, though his voice cracked.

  “Jess says,” I piped. My hands were on my hips because now I had backup. I don’t know what came over me. I could have got myself smeared all over the room.

  “Easy, partner,” Jess said to me out of the corner of his mouth. “These say it’s my business,” he said to Newt. Jess made his farmer hands into fists.

  “Eat up,” Newt said to me, and dropped my lunch on my desk. Egg salad on whole wheat.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled to Jess.

  “Anytime,” he said loud enough for Newt to hear.

  I wasn’t sure what had happened. Phyllis and . . . Roscoe Burdick? I sort of knew she wasn’t going to committee meetings when she went out every other night. But did I know this? My head buzzed.

  And how in the dickens did this big old country boy Jess even know about Roscoe Burdick and Phyllis anyway?

  Because everybody around here knew everything. Everybody but me. Jess ambled on back to his group. They stuck together and cut out right after school to do chores.

  * * *

  Phyllis wasn’t complaining these days as much as you’d think. I never saw her at school, of course, and she never came looking for me. But everybody on the high school side was getting worked up about homecoming.

  Phyllis seemed to be out at a committee meeting most nights. She naturally wouldn’t be riding on the Iota Nu Beta float because she’d made an enemy out of Waynetta Blalock. But this didn’t appear to faze her. Mother thought Phyllis was beginning to settle in.

  But then on Wednesday she dug in her heels and wouldn’t go to school. Ruth Ann came down to breakfast, bright-eyed and bushytailed, to say Phyllis was in bed for the day.

  “Oh dear,” Mother said. “Do you think she’s running a temperature?”

  “Nope.” Ruth Ann tweaked the ribbons on her braids.

  “Is she looking pale and washed out?”

  “She always looks pale and washed out without her lipstick on.” Ruth Ann made big eyes. She actually only had two expressions: worried and wide-eyed.

  Mother was at the drainboard, pouring the cream off the top of the milk. She turned. “Ruth Ann, honey, Phyllis doesn’t wear lipstick. She’s only f—”

  “Not at home,” Ruth Ann said. “She waits till she gets to school.”

  This was true. But I wouldn’t have told it because I’m not a snitch. Also, if I’d ratted on her, she’d have nuked me into next November.

  At the drainboard Mother took some deep, calming breaths. “Does Phyllis say why she isn’t going to school today?”

  Ruth Ann beamed. She was a first grader with the answer. “Elvis. They’re shipping him out to Germany today. The army is. Phyllis says she can’t be expected to concentrate on anything else.” Ruth Ann scanned Mother to see how she took this. “Phyllis says she’s in mourning for her life.”

  Mother made a tight little ball of the dish rag and gazed away out the window.

  Phyllis had been writing Elvis Presley right along since he’d been drafted into the army last winter. I didn’t see any difference between writing him at Fort Hood, Texas, and writing him in Germany. He never answered anyway. I couldn’t follow Phyllis’s thinking, and it might have been because I was a boy.

  Anyway, after sulking in bed till after school, Phyllis was up that night in time for a committee meeting about the Future Farmers of America hayride. Though I thought the Future Farmers hayride had already happened.

  * * *

  Then before you knew it, it was Saturday and nearly noon. From the other end of town the band was tuning up on the high school blacktop. The homecoming parade was a bigger deal than the game itself. People had been stuffing tissue paper into chicken wire floats all week.

  You wouldn’t expect Mrs. Dowdel to take much interest. She hated noise and hadn’t gone to high school. Besides, she and Ruth Ann were busy as bird dogs. They’d plucked all the geese Mrs. Dowdel had shot, for restuffing pillows.

  But in fact Mrs. Dowdel loved a parade and never missed one. She and Ruth Ann were setting up a picnic out front just a ditch away from the parade route. And though Mrs. Dowdel didn’t neighbor, we Barnharts were invited.

  She and Ruth Ann were back and forth from kitchen to road, bringing deviled eggs, pea salad, stuffed celery. Somehow I got pulled into it and sent to the cobhouse for folding chairs.

  “Bring extry,” Mrs. Dowdel told me. “You never
know.”

  It was a day’s work finding anything in that cobhouse. The whole place smelled like olden times: cider and neat’s-foot oil, and at one time there must have been a cat. A brace of dead, naked geese hung from the beams, plucked and singed and waiting to be melted down for grease. Big, swaying bags of goose down hung in my way. Every floorboard was loose. This was another likely spot where Mrs. Dowdel might have stashed her money.

  You never saw such a raft of stuff. Traps and tackle and a shingle machine. Ruth Ann’s hula hoop hung from a nail since she didn’t have time for it anymore. I finally dug out the folding chairs, all stenciled: PROPERTY OF THE SHELBYVILLE PARK DIST.

  * * *

  Then we were settled out by the ditch, around Mrs. Dowdel: Mother and Ruth Ann and I. Mrs. Dowdel’s big knees were wide-spread with her apron stretched drum-tight under her paper plate. Dad was to ride in the parade with the seven other preachers of the Council of Churches. We supposed Phyllis would be in the parade too, somewhere. It was an unusual sight—Mother right there next to Mrs. Dowdel.

  She overflowed two folding chairs. Nudging Mother, she said, “I worked to get all the buckshot out of this goose.” She waved a sandwich. “But watch where you chew. Bite down hard on that shot, and you could bust up your choppers.”

  Mother looked at her sliced goose sandwich.

  “I haul off and roast a goose till the skin’s crispy and it’s fallin’ off the bone,” Mrs. Dowdel explained. “And I stick a fork in it so the fat will run off. You want your goose loose. Then I’ll stuff it with prunes. Never pass up a chance at a prune.” She nudged Ruth Ann on her other side. “This girl and I has plucked all the geese, and there’ll be down enough left over for you folks’s pillows. Then we’ll go to work and melt down the carcasses we don’t eat for goose grease and add us some camphor to rub on your chest, come winter.”

  Mother took a quick look down at her own chest.

  “We eat and wear and sleep on the goose.” Mrs. Dowdel tapped Mother’s knee. “Give me a good goose every time.”

  Ruth Ann looked around her. “Me too,” she piped. “Every time.”

  Now we saw the revolving light on top of Police Chief C. P. Snokes’s Dodge, clearing the street. Right about then, here came Mrs. Wilcox, wearing carpet slippers, stumping along the slab in her hat and veil and Mackinaw jacket.

  “Hoo-boy, here comes Effie,” Mrs. Dowdel remarked. “She can smell a free lunch from here to Sunday. And you think she’s bowlegged now. You should have seen her as a girl. She’d try to cross her legs and miss.”

  Mother swallowed hard, and the band came high-stepping along, blaring a medley of fight song and “God Bless America.” The fight song was the same, though they’d changed the name of the team from “Fightin’ Farmers” to “Kickapoo Kickers.”

  Glitter batons spun in the treetops, but the majorettes were second string because Vanette Pankey and Bonnie Burhoops would be riding the homecoming queen’s float.

  An old Hupmobile sedan, about a 1932 model, rolled by, draped in bunting. It was the Daughters of the American Revolution, all seven of them shoehorned in with Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach at the wheel. Then a big wooden-sided wagon, horse-drawn, with the corn-husking team. Corn husking was a competitive sport around here. Then an antique La France hook and ladder truck.

  All the preachers of the Council of Churches were divided into a pair of Bel-Air convertibles, courtesy of the Chevrolet agency in Monticello. Dad waved at us from between two United Brethren. The other preachers were showing Dad some respect now. He sat tall among them, looking good. My dad. We waved back.

  The varsity team followed, sheepish and suited up on the seat backs of a line of Pontiac Catalinas. Then the Future Farmers hay frame, then the Home Ec Club. We looked on every float for Phyllis but didn’t see her.

  Mrs. Wilcox had settled just back of Mrs. Dowdel’s elbow. She’d propped up her veil and was working over a plate of sliced goose and baked beans.

  The excitement mounted as the big float with the homecoming court came into view, drawn by a factory-fresh John Deere tractor. Applause rippled off the porches all up the street. There on the high throne sat the Homecoming Queen surrounded by her court, all wearing dress-up suits, mum corsages, and high-heeled shoes. At the queen’s feet, representing the freshmen, was Barbara Jean Jeeter. She was sitting kind of careful on one haunch. Flanking the queen were Edna-Earl Stubbs for the sophomores, Bonnie Burhoops for the juniors, and Vanette Pankey for the seniors. They all happened to be Iota Nu Betas, though sororities weren’t allowed. Nobody quite remembered electing Waynetta Blalock as Homecoming Queen. It was just a done deal.

  “Whozatt hard-faced gal?” Mrs. Dowdel asked, pointing a stuffed celery stalk up at Waynetta, high and mighty on her throne. Her rhinestone tiara rode her blinding, flame-red locks.

  Mrs. Wilcox squinted up. “It’s Waynetta, Carleen Love-joy’s girl.”

  “She looks a little peaked and off her feed,” Mrs. Dowdel observed. “And I’ve seen better hair on bacon.”

  Mother choked.

  It was tradition that each girl on the float be attended by her boyfriend or some guy from her class. But Waynetta had ruled all boys off the float because her boyfriend didn’t go to high school and wasn’t available. The whole school knew this. Ruth Ann knew this. No boys because Waynetta said so.

  She’d been smirking from side to side right through town, but Mrs. Dowdel’s was the last house before the open fields.

  Slowly, Waynetta turned and deigned to look down upon us. Real slow, though I doubt if she looked Mrs. Dowdel in the eye.

  There was something up there in Waynetta’s lap. You’d expect a spray of American Beauty roses, something like that. But no. It was a small, weird shape nestled up there. And bald. And one-eyed. It was a doll, loved to baldness with but a single working eye. Waynetta held it out for us to see.

  “Grachel!” Ruth Ann screamed, flying off her folding chair. Her picnic went everywhere. “GIMME BACK GRACHEL!”

  It was Ruth Ann’s long-lost doll, so she hadn’t gone home to Terre Haute after all.

  With a casual gesture, Waynetta pitched Grachel into the air. She turned in the afternoon, arms out, and lit in the ditch. Ruth Ann lunged.

  In a voice way too tough for a Homecoming Queen, Waynetta hollered out, “And tell Phyllis Barnhart to keep her thieving hands off my man, or she’ll end up in the ditch herself, and I’ll see to it personally. And I’ll black both her eyes. I knew she was trouble the minute I laid eyes on her.”

  Her court seemed to go along with it. Vanette Pankey nodded down at us, saying, “She means it.”

  Waynetta adjusted her tiara, and the parade lurched past us. It rolled on out into the countryside to disband. Dust settled.

  I thought it was pretty lowdown, picking on a little kid and stealing her doll because you didn’t like her big sister. So I was in the ditch, helping Ruth Ann fish Grachel out of some standing water. Ruth Ann was crying, partly from relief. But also because somebody was nasty enough to kidnap Grachel.

  “But what did all that mean?” Mother said, completely baffled.

  I had a hazy idea, though I wasn’t a hundred percent.

  Mrs. Dowdel said nothing but “Hoo-boy.”

  “You can say that again,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

  * * *

  Phyllis swung home for a quick supper with us that evening. We hadn’t seen her in the parade because, as she said, she’d been back at school on the clean-up committee. Though she never cleaned up anything around home, including her own room.

  Then in a pair of fresh socks, she was heading for the door and the sock hop down at the gym. Mother thought it was all right because teachers would be there to chaperone. “But be back by ten,” Mother called after her. “You’re only f—”

  “Don’t wait up,” Phyllis yelled as the door banged behind her.

  The rest of us had a quiet night at home. Fairly quiet. These nights there were always people out in Mrs. Dowdel’s melon patch,
many with lanterns and all with spades, digging. They were the ones who believed she’d buried her money in her patch. Mrs. Dowdel let them think it. Her crops were all in, and the ground needed a good digging over before winter anyway. All she did was serve notice on the world that she’d be out in her patch on Halloween night in case of funny business. So bear it in mind.

  It was all hours when a pounding came on our front door. Mother was still awake because Phyllis wasn’t home yet. She started down the stairs and stopped.

  “Jack, get up and get dressed,” she called in to Dad. “I’m afraid it’s Mrs. Dowdel.”

  Now I was up and trailing Mother downstairs. Only Ruth Ann slept through this. She and Grachel were tucked up in bed, sawing logs.

  Out on the porch the discs of Mrs. Dowdel’s spectacles flashed in the ceiling light. Mother fumbled the door open, and we saw someone else. Not Mrs. Wilcox. It was another small gnome of a figure—one more ancient lady in a town full of them. She wore old-fashioned metal curlers in her sparse hair and a fur coat. White cold cream clung in all the crevices of her face. I almost knew her.

  Mother wavered on the doorsill.

  “This here’s Cora Shellabarger.” Mrs. Dowdel pointed out the small figure sagging in her shadow. She was one of the Shellabarger sisters, the richest old maids in town. “She come to me about it instead of heading directly to you folks.”

  Miss Cora Shellabarger seemed to whimper. “Well, it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring to the preacher, of all people.”

  “Everybody brings everything to my door,” Mrs. Dowdel proclaimed. “I’m the town dump.” She elbowed Miss Shellabarger. “Go ahead and tell ’em, Cora. Spit it out and shuck right down to the cob.”

  Miss Shellabarger worked her hands. “I wish Flora had come in place of me,” she murmured. “It’s about your girl, Mrs. Barnhart, your daughter Phyllis. She’s breathing, and she’s conscious, and she’s on the settee in our front room. And I don’t want you to worry because we think she’ll live.”

  CHAPTER TEN