A Year Down Yonder Read online

  Shamed though she was, Maxine had to go back to work at the post office. From the stamp counter she sent forth word that Arnold Green had deceived her. Her reputation was in ruins, and he’d have to marry her.

  I suppose word of this must have reached Grandma.

  One night out of the blue, she said to me, “You better have your lady teacher here to supper one night.”

  I jumped. “Miss Butler?” Here?

  Grandma nodded. “She’ll be passing out grades pretty soon. You want to keep on the good side of her.”

  I was already on the good side of her. I got the only A’s she gave in English. Grandma didn’t tell me to invite Mr. Herkimer, though she well knew how I was doing in math.

  “Grandma, do I have to?”

  Miss Butler looked startled when I invited her for supper. She was too polite to say no, but she gave me a long look, curious and dubious.

  When the evening came, I sat waiting for her in our front room. Grandma had cooked all day, and I was a bundle of nerves.

  At the sound of a timid knock, I opened the front door to Miss Butler. She was in her dotted Swiss.

  “Well, Mary Alice,” she said, “how ... nice.”

  Seeing my teacher in our front room was eerie. It was a new experience for Miss Butler too. When I showed her to a chair, her eyes roamed the room. She read Grandma’s Souvenir of Starved Rock pillow. She noticed the flat square in the carpet where we’d taken down the stove after winter. Since most of what she’d heard about us Dowdels didn’t make for polite conversation, ours drifted.

  Grandma loomed suddenly in the door to the kitchen, in a fresh apron. “Come on in,” she boomed at Miss Butler, “and we’ll tie the feedbag on you.”

  Miss Butler quaked.

  So did I when I saw the kitchen table. It was set with four places.

  Before I could think, Arnold Green stepped up behind us. His horn-rims flashed, and my brain buzzed. Miss Butler was so refined, even prim. And there was talk of running Arnold Green out of town for ruining Maxine Patch. And Grandma had invited him to supper. Oh, Grandma, I thought, what are you up to?

  I fumbled over the introductions. “I have heard so much about—I mean, how do you do?” Miss Butler murmured to Mr. Green.

  I knew I couldn’t eat a bite. But Grandma bustled around our chairs, loading the table. Fried chicken. Mashed turnips. Hominy with stewed tomatoes and a casserole of canned green beans and fatback. Since nothing was ready in the garden, there was a quivering green Jell-O mold. There were corn muffins and cloverleaf rolls. Two kinds of jelly in cut-glass dishes. A decorative butter pat from Cowgills’ Dairy Farm. You couldn’t see the oilcloth.

  “Oh my,” murmured Miss Butler, “how ... much.”

  But Arnold Green fell to it. He didn’t feed this well up at The Coffee Pot Cafe, and he was a starving artist.

  Grandma presided from her end of the table, gazing at a gizzard and demolishing a thigh. She piled bones, waiting for the silence to force conversation.

  At last, Miss Butler chanced a glance across the groaning table at Arnold Green. I was too young to know how much a dangerous man interests a good woman.

  His glasses were steamed from the dinner, so it was hard to catch his eye. But she spoke. “I so admire the artistic temperament.”

  In silence Grandma loaded a fork with mashed turnip.

  Miss Butler had a low, pleasing voice when she wasn’t yelling at us in school. “My only talent is appreciation,” she said. “I sit at the feet of the Bard.”

  Arnold Green flickered.

  “Indeed, I look up to all men of artistic talent,” Miss Butler said, though she was no shorter than Arnold Green. He looked suddenly across cruets at her.

  Their eyes met.

  Somehow, Grandma knew. In a town like this, an unmarried man was either going to be packed off or picked off. She’d decided against Maxine Patch. She backed Miss Butler.

  For the rest of the month until he went back to New York, most evenings found Arnold Green strolling to the Noah Atterberrys’. Miss Butler roomed there. They sat out on the porch swing in full view. At the time I supposed they discussed art and poetry and Paris. He used Vitalis now, and Kreml for his dandruff. Grandma kept him in clean shirts. Public opinion shifted his way. Maxine Patch was fit to be tied.

  And I didn’t mind too much about Royce. He was friendly enough, but either he was keeping his distance, or I was keeping mine. We’d both been strangers in their midst here, but was that enough? I guessed not and didn’t mind too much. Really, not at all, hardly.

  Gone with the Wind

  Suddenly school was almost out and summer upon us. And I didn’t know what to think about that.

  We had a stretch of perfect weather, here in the healthiest climate in Illinois. Little red blushes showed down in Grandma’s strawberry plants. The hollyhocks were every color. Trees leafed out overnight, and the streets were like tunnels with bright countryside at either end. One magic morning the whole town was scented with lilac.

  Spring didn’t come to Chicago like this. I went around with a lump in my throat I couldn’t account for. Then a letter came from Mother with a postscript from Dad.

  We’d written back and forth all year, though of course I didn’t tell them everything. Mother always tucked in a stamp for me to use to write back. Joey sent postcards: of a burro in a sombrero, of the Fort Peck dam. One was of the Great Salt Lake with a little bag of real salt sewn to the card. I still have them. Then this letter came from Mother and Dad.

  I’d make my way to school every morning lost in thought. By now I knew who lived in every house along the way. I knew this town as I’d never know Chicago.

  Graduation was coming, though we were only graduating five: four girls who never spoke to anybody younger, just like in Chicago, and Royce McNabb. They’d chosen their class motto:WE FINISH—

  ONLY TO BEGIN

  Now plans were afoot for the all-school party to wind up the year. We’d divided into committees, though Carleen Lovejoy didn’t want me on hers. I was one of them now, but I hadn’t been born here.

  Then, in the midst of an ideal day, the sky outside our classroom windows turned a shade of yellow I’d never seen. We were in Home Ec., and the room stirred. This was one of those times when everybody else knew something I didn’t.

  The siren on the town water tower suddenly wailed. Mr. Fluke leaned in the door. “Miss Butler, get your girls down the basement, quick as you can.”

  She laid a hand on her throat. She was wearing an engagement ring now, about an eighth of a carat. Something akin to the end of the world seemed to be happening. It was like evening in here. People were just shapes. I turned to Ina-Rae.

  “That’s the tornado siren,” she said, bug-eyed and already out of her desk. She often looked worried. Now she looked scared. I was petrified. I’d heard about tornadoes, but thought they happened somewhere else. Everybody filed out, so orderly, I didn’t know them. Then we were on the stairs to the basement.

  Then I’d shied off and was running across the school-yard, skirttails whipping, Cuban heels pounding. Anybody with good sense was taking cover, but I wanted to go home. A breeze came up. The Coffee Pot Cafe looked empty, and the screen door was beginning to flap.

  Hanging pots swayed on people’s porches, and it kept getting darker. When I was in sight of home, rain bucketed from every direction. There was Grandma, making her way to the house up the back walk, leaning into the wind. She held something against herself, folded in her apron.

  She looked astounded to see me and pointed to the house. The clothesline was twanging, and the wet wind was full of chaff from the fields. We made it to the kitchen, plastered with wet leaves. She sent me down the cellar stairs ahead of her. “Go to the southwest corner.”

  But I didn’t know where it was. Everybody but me knew you always shelter in the southwest corner of the cellar. Tornadoes come from that direction, usually. With any luck, the house will be blown off you, not on you.

&nbs
p; She got around me and led the way. I’d never known more about the cellar than I could help. If we had a snake in the attic, who knew what lived down here? It had an earth floor, and it was stacked with jars. I thought of flying glass.

  A splintery old deacon’s bench was wedged across the southwest corner. Grandma dropped down, breathing hard. I needed to know if we were going to die. In the gloom her gleaming spectacles turned on me.

  “What in the Sam Hill did that school send you kids home for?” she said over the whining wind. “They ought to have you under the tables in the school basement.”

  “I escaped. I wanted to ... come home.”

  She could read minds, even in the dark. She knew I’d wanted to make sure she was all right. “I’ve lived through all of them so far,” she said.

  But now she was having trouble keeping the bundle in her apron quiet. I felt a paw on my knee as Bootsie stepped from Grandma’s lap to mine. Grandma gave up and uncovered April’s little green eyes blinking up at us. “Grandma, you saved them.”

  She shrugged that off. “I happened to be down in the cobhouse when the siren went.”

  That was a whopper. We both knew it. Bootsie was butting my hand, digging in her claws to find a safe place.

  We began to hear more than wind lashing the trees. The air was full of things now, anything loose. “Grandma, are we going to—”

  A terrible sound wiped my mind clean. It was like a giant, chattering typewriter directly overhead.

  “That’ll be the tacks coming out of the tar paper on the roof,” Grandma hollered in my ear. “Hoo-boy.”

  Then a Wabash locomotive came full steam at us, out of the sky. “Here we go,” she said. She pushed my head down, and we bent double over the cats. Bootsie froze.

  Then sudden silence popped my ears. Not a jam jar jiggled. Years later, seemingly, the siren sounded all clear.

  Ordinary gray afternoon fell through the kitchen windows when we got upstairs. Grandma’s gardening hat still hung from a chair back. She jammed it on her head, and I followed her out onto the back porch.

  A wide strip of tar paper curled down off the eaves. Grandma looked past it to survey the yard. It looked like a light snow had fallen. But it was the shredded blossoms of the snowball bushes. Limbs were everywhere. Grandma told me to take the cats down to the cobhouse. “They shed,” she said. “And bring back gum boots, gloves, and a crowbar. And step right along.”

  Then we were walking through town. I cleared our way through the fallen branches, so I was glad for the gloves. Chimney bricks were everywhere, and lengths of drainpipe, and barrel staves. A voice or two sounded far off from people venturing out. We turned down a street and came to Old Man Nyquist’s big corner lot. The barn stood, but there wasn’t a leaf on his pecan tree. The front porch and the dog underneath it were missing from his house, and you could see through the roof.

  Stepping over lumber, we went around back to get in his kitchen that way. It had been a wreck before the storm—crusty pans in the sink, a sticky, never-scrubbed floor. Grandma examined it to see if it would take her weight.

  “He naps,” she said, starting up the stairs. Behind the first door was nothing but stack after stack of yellowed newspapers. Behind the second door half the ceiling had come down on a collapsed iron bedstead. And under the bedstead was Old Man Nyquist, pinned.

  Haunted eyes bored out of a gaunt, gray face. It looked like we weren’t a minute too soon. The crowbar came in handy as we worked like troopers, shifting the bedstead off him. A ton of plaster had fallen on it. We were standing in piles more. At last, Old Man Nyquist rolled free and glared up from the floor. We were all white with plaster dust.

  “You old busybody buzzard,” he growled at Grandma. “How’d you get in?”

  “Your kitchen door’s in the yard, you ossified old owl-hoot,” Grandma yelled, returning fire. “I come to rob you blind.”

  He noticed the crowbar. “You would too.” He wasn’t stone deaf, though he hadn’t heard the siren.

  Staggering to his feet, he swayed like an ancient, punch-drunk prizefighter. I thanked heaven he napped in his clothes. Crunching over to the window, he looked out.

  He squinted hard and turned in triumph. “You’ll be hurtin’ for pecans this fall!” he bellowed at Grandma.

  “Then I’ll get me something else you’ve got,” she blasted back. “So keep it nailed down and locked up, you old skinflint.”

  “Biddy!” he barked.

  “Coot!” she replied.

  Then we left.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of there. A block away I said, “Grandma, Old Man Nyquist’s mean.”

  She nodded. “Nobody’ll go near him. He’d have been wedged under them bedsprings till the next Republican administration.”

  Nobody’d go near him but Grandma.

  We walked on toward the Wabash tracks, keeping an eye out for downed wires. Now I knew where we were heading next. We crossed the tracks and turned past the grain elevator and Veech’s garage. Beyond the Deere implement shed we saw Mrs. Effie Wilcox’s house still standing, though her front gate hung by a hinge.

  But then maybe it always had. I didn’t get over on this side of the tracks very often. Bent siding from the implement shed littered her yard, but her porch was still on. Grandma tried not to hurry. You could see most of the house from the front door, but she made free to go inside.

  Mrs. Wilcox decorated her living-room walls with magazine pictures of puppies and people from the Bible. These were all in place. The crocheted antimacassars in variegated colors lay flat on her chair arms.

  Mumbling with nerves, Grandma twitched through the rooms. Mrs. Wilcox’s bed was made. Grandma looked under it. In the kitchen an uncorked Lydia Pinkham’s bottle stood untoppled on the drainboard. But the house was deserted.

  “Grandma, are we going to have to look in her cellar?”

  “She don’t have one.” Grandma’s brow was furrowed. She glanced out the back door. I couldn’t see anything out there, but that was the point. At the end of her garden was a hole in the ground, surrounded by headless jonquils.

  Grandma nearly fell back. “Her privy’s gone. What if she blew away in it?”

  What if she fell in the hole? But I fought the thought. Just the idea of Mrs. Wilcox sailing over the grain elevator in her privy was enough.

  The front door squawked behind us. Mrs. Wilcox drifted through her house and appeared in the kitchen, her usual self. She went all over town in an apron and a hat and carpet slippers. Three in her kitchen was a crowd.

  “Howdy,” she said, focusing on us.

  Grandma turned on her. “Effie, where you been?”

  Mrs. Wilcox drew in her cheeks, a sight in itself. “Well, I don’t like to say.”

  Grandma’s eyes snapped. “I thought you’d blown away in your privy.”

  “I come close,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “When the siren blew, I got behind my pie safe, and I was too nervous to live. Couldn’t hardly wait for the all clear. Then I really had to go, but my privy had went.”

  Grandma rubbed her forehead. “So you wandered off to use somebody else’s privy.”

  “Yours,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

  We left then, Grandma bustling to prove she hadn’t given two hoots about Mrs. Wilcox. But I saw through that. I hadn’t lived with her all year for nothing. Sometimes I thought I was turning into her. I had to watch out not to talk like her. And I was to cook like her for all the years to come.

  Picking our way through debris, we crossed the tracks at the Wabash depot. The town swarmed with people, assessing the damage. Weirdly, the sun came out. “We got off easy,” Grandma remarked.

  “Were tornadoes worse when you were a girl?” I asked to test her.

  She waved me away. “What we had today was a light breeze. When I was a girl, a tornado hit an outdoor band concert. It twisted the tuba player four feet into the ground like a corkscrew before we could get help to him.”

  We strolled on in our gum boots, Grandma
swinging the crowbar.

  “Grandma, is Mrs. Wilcox your best friend?”

  “We neighbors,” she said.

  After Grandma and I got home, we cleaned up the yard, working together till dark.

  As Grandma said, we got off easy. The tornado had dealt us a glancing blow. It set down on farmland between here and Oakley, plowing a giant furrow and annihilating a corncrib. But it was all people talked about, so the end of school crept up before we knew it.

  I noticed a change in Grandma. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether she was changing or I was. But this time she was. Though never idle, she was a whirling dervish now. She undertook a second bout of spring cleaning, even after she’d rubbed all the finish off the house the first time around. Now that Arnold Green had gone back to New York to await Miss Butler, Grandma turned his mattress and painted all the trim in his room.

  I came home one afternoon to find half the contents of the cobhouse out in the yard. I thought the tornado had come back. Grandma was inside with her hair tied up, giving the cobhouse the cleaning-out of its life. She could never throw anything away but a used-up flypaper strip, so she was rearranging. In the yard stood a turning lathe, a shingle machine, a circular saw, and a row of chamber pots from the days when they were decorated with moss roses. Bootsie and April sat up on the back porch, waiting for this to be over.

  When I offered to give Grandma a hand, she snapped my head off. “Go on up to the house and study for them exams,” she barked. Though we both knew no power on earth would save me in math. But she wouldn’t even let me set the table for supper these nights. I took my sweet time figuring out what had come over Grandma.

  Then graduation came, with ceremonies in the United Brethren Church. All the town but Grandma was there. After the experience of the Christmas program, Miss Butler decided against pulling a choir together. As president of the board of education, Mr. Earl T. Askew handed out the five diplomas, and Royce McNabb was Valedictorian. He’d won a tuition scholarship to the U. of I. at Champaign.