A Year Down Yonder Read online

  She pulled out her pins and combs to let down her hair, and that was a bigger job. Her hair fell to her waist. She bent into an enamel pan on an old pine table in the yard, and I lathered her head.

  “Dig in,” she said. “Get them cooties where they live.” But she had an awful lot of hair. We rinsed in cold water, and she came up gasping time after time.

  She wrung out her hair in the sun. It was whiter than the clouds scudding overhead. Oh, that bright afternoon, scented with lye and the greening earth. And Grandma shaking out enough white hair to nest a flock of birds.

  A spanking breeze had dried the sheets. I was taking them down when a man started across the side yard. A stranger. “Grandma,” I said, to warn her.

  “Whoa,” she called out to him. “What’s your business?”

  He carried nothing in his hands and looked travel-worn. I wondered if he was a drifter who’d wandered away from the Wabash tracks.

  “I’m looking for a room,” he said in a funny accent. He was a little fellow for this part of the country.

  “Who sent you to me?”

  You can picture how Grandma appeared to him. He looked up to see all that hair standing out around her head like a mane. Her skirts were hiked to keep out of the laundry fire. Each one of her legs was as big around as his waist.

  “The postmistress,” he said, blinking through horn-rimmed glasses.

  Grandma looked skeptical. “Maxine Patch sent you to me?”

  I knew Maxine Patch, the postmistress. When I was still sending my “Newsy Notes” to the county seat newspaper, I’d had to deal with her. I’d given up writing “Newsy Notes” before people found out who was writing them. I was learning from Grandma how to keep my business private.

  “She just said I’d have to go door-to-door to see if anybody’d rent me a room.” The stranger still stared. Grandma was such an awesome sight that he could hardly keep his thoughts in order. “And you’re the last house in town. Don’t you people have a hotel around here?”

  “Used to, but it was burned to the ground in the War of 1812.” Grandma watched him to see if he was dumb enough to believe the War of 1812 had been fought around here.

  He was.

  “Where you from?” she asked.

  “New York.”

  He stood drooping in the yard, keeping his distance from Grandma. “I’m here from the WPA. The Works Progress Administration.”

  “The government?” Grandma’s eyes narrowed.

  He nodded. “I’m supposed to do some painting in the post office.”

  “Give it two coats,” Grandma advised. “The paint’s about the only thing that’s holding it up.” The post office was a one-room shanty behind The Coffee Pot Cafe. It used to be the barber shop.

  “Not that kind of painting,” he said, tired. “I’m an artist. I work large. Murals, mostly.”

  Now Grandma stared. But I knew what he meant. The federal government had sent WPA artists to Chicago to paint murals in public buildings up there. The lobbies were painted over with big tough women and bulging men in workshirts, swinging hammers and sickles, all of them larger than life.

  So was Grandma, as the stranger could see. “Well, you won’t get a mural on our post office,” she told him. “There’s not room in that crackerbox to hang up your tintype.”

  He knew that. “But they cut my orders in Washington.”

  Now Grandma’s eyes narrowed to slits. “That’s our tax dollars in action,” she said. “What they paying you?”

  “Four dollars per diem,” he said.

  “Son, you’re home,” Grandma said. “It ought to take you about a month not to paint a mural in the post office. I charge two dollars and fifty cents a day. You can get your meals up at The Coffee Pot Cafe.”

  I nearly keeled over. I didn’t think the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago charged two dollars and fifty cents for a room. But Grandma judged it was fair. She saw a chance to recover some of her tax money from the government. Though I doubted if she paid taxes.

  “It’s steep rent,” the stranger said, bravely.

  “And the last house in town,” Grandma replied.

  That’s how we got our lodger, Arnold Green, the New York artist. Grandma shook him down for ten dollars in advance. She sent me inside for some of Grandpa Dowdel’s clothes. And she aimed him at the cobhouse to skin off what he was wearing. She built up the fire and tossed his traveling clothes into the pot. She threw out his socks and scrubbed his shirt on the washboard, white hair flying.

  “Laundry included in the rent,” she said generously.

  Grandma gave Arnold Green the bedroom facing the Wabash tracks. In its closet was the trapdoor to the attic. She provided a ladder so he could use the attic for an artist’s studio. She was generous to a fault. He collected his easel from the depot and set it up under the attic’s slanting rafters.

  I couldn’t sleep upstairs next door to a man. I had to sleep downstairs on a cot at the foot of Grandma’s bed. And she could outsnore Aunt Mae Griswold, but the money was rolling in, so what could I say?

  Word went out like the wind that Grandma had snagged an artist on government pay and was charging three, four, as much as five dollars a day, depending on who told it.

  Arnold Green was no trouble. He came and went and lurked in the attic most of the time. He was such a small man, you hardly noticed him.

  Not that Grandma didn’t take an interest. One night when he was passing through the kitchen on his way up to The Coffee Pot Cafe, she stopped him cold in the door. Though she never pried, she said, “You a married man?”

  He said he wasn’t.

  “You thinking about getting married and settling down in these parts?”

  He staggered back from the screen door and turned. “In these parts?” He looked horrified. His hair nearly stood on end.

  “Why not? It’s a better climate than New York,” said Grandma, who’d never been there. “It’s the healthiest spot in Illinois. We had to hang a man to start the graveyard.”

  Arnold Green bolted into the night.

  We sat on at the kitchen table, over the remains of supper. “Grandma, were you pulling his leg?”

  “I was giving him fair warning,” she said. “Maxine Patch found him on the first day. She’ll be up at The Coffee Pot this minute, layin’ in wait. She’s thirty-six and man-hungry.” Grandma’s lips pleated knowingly, and the toothpick pointed out this truth. “And there hasn’t been an unmarried man around here since the last chain gang went through.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that. Maxine Patch had a figure you noticed, but not the face to go with it. And she was thirty-six, so I probably thought that was way too old to be thinking about romance.

  Besides, I had other matters on my mind. Personal business. Final exams were coming up, and I wasn’t pulling my weight in Mr. Herkimer’s math class. First semester, I’d collected a C, happy to get it. Now I didn’t know if I was doing that well. It was business math this spring, full of percentages, dry measures, and profit-and-loss. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it.

  Royce McNabb was a math whiz. One of the rumors swirling around him was that he was teaching himself trigonometry, whatever that is. And he was the best-looking boy in the county. So I formed a plan. I’d been forming it since Valentine’s Day, but now I’d have to speak to Grandma. Catching her in a quiet moment, I said, “I’m falling a little behind in math.”

  She listened, narrow-eyed.

  “I thought I’d ask that new boy to come over. Royce McNabb, I think his name is. So we could study together.”

  “Do tell.” Grandma pondered. “Think he knows more math than the teacher?”

  Well, no, but—then I saw she was pulling my leg. I thought I’d better come clean, never an easy decision at sixteen. “Grandma, Carleen Lovejoy’s set her cap for him. And I want to make my move before she makes hers.”

  That was talking her language. “We’ll squeeze some lemons for a pitcher of lemonade,” she said.
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br />   But that didn’t solve everything. I wanted to invite Royce on Sunday afternoon because that was when Grandma napped. The whole town did.

  “We could study in the front room where it’s quiet,” I said to her carefully.

  She gazed upon me like the sphinx.

  “Grandma, I want you to leave us alone. You know how people talk about you. How you’re trigger-happy and things like that. I don’t want you scaring Royce off.”

  “Who, me?” she said, the image of astonishment.

  Then I had to get up the nerve to invite Royce, and we’d scarcely spoken two words to each other. And I couldn’t just barge up to him. Carleen watched him like a hawk all day long, and I didn’t want to show my hand. Finally, I wrote him a note. I was better in composition than math. I slipped it to him, and he slipped it back. Written on the note in his square hand was, I still have it.

  OK,

  Royce

  As Grandma would say, that Sunday afternoon liked to never come. I counted the hours and nearly wore out both my summer dresses, trying them on to decide which to wear. Now I don’t remember which I chose.

  When Sunday afternoon finally came, the whole town was sleeping off big dinners as I paced the front room. Grandma was offstage but audible. I could hear her two rooms away. One of her snores had a whistle in it like Aunt Mae’s. Her other one was low and throaty, like pigs eating clinkers.

  A pitcher of lemonade stood on the marble-topped table. I was sweating more than it was. For some reason, I thought it would look nice if I was carrying a lacy handkerchief when Royce got there.

  I heard the kickstand on his bike ring on the concrete of the front walk. I’d unlatched the screen door so I could sweep it open to him without a fumble. It seemed to me I’d thought everything out.

  When Royce filled the door, I thought of Joey. Royce was that tall, that broad across the shoulders. Then I fumbled the doorknob because my lacy handkerchief was a damp ball in my hand. I’d ripped it in two. And I wished I’d had some perfume to wear, just a dab behind each ear, in case that worked on a boy.

  Somehow I got Royce inside. We stood there, alone at last. I was lightly scented with lye soap. His red-gold, sunstruck hair was tousled from his bike ride. I stood near enough to have to look up to him.

  He looked down and spoke to me, really for the first time. “You know,” he said in his manly voice, “percentages are basically decimals. Maybe we ought to start there.”

  I blinked. Did he notice I didn’t put that stuff on my eyelashes that Carleen put on hers? And no, we weren’t going to start the afternoon with decimals. That could lead to fractions. I drew Royce across the airless room to the lemonade.

  We sat there with glasses in our hands, listening to Grandma snore.

  “My grandmother,” I explained, with a little shrug and a shy smile I’d never used before.

  “That’d be Mrs. Dowdel?” Royce looked curious, wary.

  I nodded, looking aside. Butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth.

  Royce sat with legs apart, elbows on knees. Actually, he sat like Grandma did. Then he said, “We have something in common, you and me.”

  “We do?” Oh, how close to simpering I was. Another minute and you wouldn’t know me from Carleen.

  “I’m a stranger here myself,” Royce said. “I’m from Mattoon. You’re from Chicago. We’re a couple of foreigners here.”

  Royce McNabb was finding things we had in common, without even being prompted. Sweet, silent Sunday afternoon seemed to unfold before us, and I could swear I heard violin music from nowhere. I searched for a reply worthy of Royce. I searched too long.

  A bloodcurdling scream from over our heads cut Sunday afternoon in two.

  Then mingled screams, from up in the attic, and crashing and banging like you never heard. Royce came up in a crouch.

  We both heard Grandma’s feet hit the floor by her bed. When she galloped into the front room, she was wearing an old bathrobe and Grandpa Dowdel’s Romeo house shoes. Her spectacles hung from one ear. On her way through the kitchen she’d grabbed up her twelve-gauge Winchester from behind the woodbox.

  “Where’s it coming from?” she demanded.

  Royce shied at the sight of the gun, and Grandma, but we both pointed to the ceiling. Plaster dust sifted down. Now the crashing and banging and running into things was coming from straight overhead, from Arnold Green’s room.

  “Hoo-boy,” Grandma said.

  When Royce could tear his eyes off Grandma in sleep-wear, heavily armed, he knocked back his lemonade. The noise from above was still terrific, like the ceiling could give way any second now. But Royce looked ready for anything, except what happened next.

  Somebody was thundering down the stairs. When she came into view, it was Maxine Patch, the postmistress. Draped and coiled all over her was the biggest snake I’ve ever seen outside the Brookfield Zoo.

  Maxine was screaming for her life, and that snake was all over her. It looped around her shoulders where it seemed to have dropped on her. It clung to one of her sizable hips. And there was still snake to spare.

  And though I couldn’t believe my eyes—and heaven knows, Royce couldn’t believe his—the snake was all that Maxine wore.

  She did a dance around the platform rocker, barefoot. Bare everything except for a rose in her hair. She was all ghastly pale flesh and black snake. And she couldn’t shake that snake for all the shimmying in the world.

  Grandma worked around her to get the front door open. With a scream and a hiss, Maxine and the snake leaped through it. They did a fast Hawaiian hula off the porch and skimmed around the snowball bushes, making for town.

  “That’s too good a show to keep to ourselves,” Grandma said.

  With the thought, she was through the door and out in the front yard. Planting her house shoes, she jammed the Winchester into her shoulder, aimed high, and squeezed off both barrels. The world exploded. Birds rose shrieking from the trees, and the town woke with a start.

  Royce and I watched from the door. I was half dead with embarrassment. Royce rubbed the back of his neck in a dazed way, but he was all eyes when it came to Maxine’s retreating figure. We saw the snake drop off her just as she left our property.

  But Maxine kept going, racing for the post office. She lived with her folks, the Ivan Patches, but she couldn’t go home wearing only a rose. Did she think she could make it all the way to the post office unnoticed? If she’d been thinking at all, she’d have doubled back to brave Grandma and get her clothes. But she didn’t. When people alerted by the gunfire ran to their windows, they saw Maxine Patch as nature intended, speeding past their houses and straight into the annals of undying fame.

  Grandma dragged the shotgun back to the porch pillar. There she sagged and seemed to weep, in mirth or joy. Then she came on back inside, pushing past Royce, who seemed turned to stone, though he was never a big talker.

  “Grandma, what in the world was a snake that big doing in the house?” I said, at the end of my rope. “What was any snake doing in here?”

  She propped the smoking gun against the marble-topped table to wipe her wet eyes. She hooked her spectacles over both ears. “That snake lives here, up in the attic.”

  So that was what had been thumping right over my room all this time. A hideous, huge, coiling, striking snake directly over my head. Bootsie knew.

  “Grandma, why?”

  “It keeps down the birds,” Royce said, recovering.

  “That’s right,” Grandma said. “Birds get in under the roof of an old house. You can’t keep them out. But a snake will keep them down.”

  Royce was edging around her, to the door. “Well, I probably ought to get going,” he said. “But ... thanks. It was a real interesting afternoon. I never saw a—” But now he was gone, pedaling away down the walk. And all my hopes went with him.

  I turned on Grandma. But then we both saw Arnold Green standing there, swaying at the foot of the stairs. He was gray-faced, ashen-lipped. His eyes sta
red out of his horn-rims. He was a wreck in an artist’s smock. A brush was frozen in his hand. He tried to speak.

  Grandma observed him severely.

  Still in shock, Arnold Green said, “Sh—sh—sh—”

  “She’s gone,” Grandma said. “The snake peeled off, but Maxine kept travelin’.”

  “It fe—fe—fe—”

  “Fell on her in the attic. It lives in the rafters,” Grandma said. “I forgot to mention that.”

  Arnold Green said, “It’s been up there a—a—a—”

  “All along,” Grandma said. “And I don’t allow women upstairs.”

  “She was po—po—po—”

  “Posing?” Grandma said. “Well, I better make a rule against painting pictures of naked women in my attic.”

  “Not na—na—naked. Nude,” said Arnold Green. “I studied in Paris.”

  Grandma didn’t throw him out and send him on his way. Not at two dollars and fifty cents a day. Arnold Green brought his easel down from the attic that same Sunday afternoon. Something Grandma said left him with the impression that the snake was gone for good. Still, he nailed the trapdoor shut and painted in his bedroom.

  I supposed my life was over. On Monday at school, I couldn’t even look Royce McNabb’s way. I supposed all his worst fears about me had been realized, and then some. Now he thought I lived in a madhouse with a trigger-happy grandma and snakes and naked—nude women in the attic.

  But everybody was in such an uproar, I was lost in the shuffle. People who hadn’t even seen her could describe every square inch of Maxine Patch, speeding like Eve, headlong through town on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Augie Fluke said she did the high jump over tree stumps. Ina-Rae didn’t know what to think, but knew better than to quiz me about it. Then when we got up for the Pledge of Allegiance, Royce looked back and somehow caught my eye. And he winked. That could have meant anything, of course. But I tried my shy smile again and hoped for the best.

  Before that week was out it began to dawn on me that nobody would hold a little excitement against you in a town as quiet as this one. And just as they’d begun to take him for granted, Arnold Green sparked new interest. There was some talk about running him out of town. Various church groups called meetings.