第2章 生活与羁绊

Vittles and Vengeance

I little knew what a big holiday Halloween was in a town like Grandma’s. Up in Chicago we didn’t make much of it. A little trick-or-treating in a sheet. Maybe a cardboard jack-o’-lantern from Woolworth’s with a candle inside if your apartment windows faced the street. But that was about the size of it.

Down here it went on for weeks, worse on the weekends. By the time Columbus Day was over, half the privies in town were uprooted and laid flat. One morning we came to school to find a complete old-fashioned buggy up on the bell tower, swinging from an axle.

I expected Grandma to be a target. Old people in big houses were. But then Grandma wasn’t just any old person. What the Halloweeners didn’t know was that Halloween was her favorite holiday. And being mostly boys, they didn’t seem to remember this lesson from year to year.

The fall was Grandma’s favorite season. She liked laying in her supplies for cold weather. As soon as the first hard frost struck her garden, she foraged farther from home. She was like a big, bushy-tailed squirrel in an apron, gathering against the long winter.

Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and there was to be a school party on Saturday night for the entire community. It was a typical school plan to keep us out of mischief. When Grandma heard about it, she said, “If they bob for apples, bring home two or three. We’ll bake ’em with brown sugar.”

Being fifteen, I didn’t tell Grandma any more about high school than I could help. But she always knew everything anyway, so I showed her a notice from the principal, Mr. Fluke. The grammar in it was good, so Miss Butler must have ghostwritten it. She asked parents to provide party refreshments. In those times people turned out in droves if there was anything to eat.

“Vittles,” Grandma said, scanning Miss Butler’s appeal. “That’ll mean pies.”

“Gooseberry?” I asked. She was famous for her gooseberry pie.

But she waved me away. “You don’t make a pie out of canned fruit until the dead of winter when you don’t have any choice.” She spoke of the winter ahead as a war she’d be waging. I must have pictured the two of us in an igloo, spearing fish through the ice. “Punkin and pecan,” she said, “and we’re going to be busy night and day. Girl, I hope you remember something about rolling out pie crust.”

We were just finished with supper. Now I slipped away from the table with a crumbling baking powder biscuit in my pocket. Grandma and I had been having a battle about Bootsie. Grandma had never heard of cat food in a can. And there were precious few table scraps around here. She said cats were natural hunters and Bootsie could find her own meals. Cats are like the Burdicks, she said. They’d eat anything they could bite.

It was true. Bootsie had begun to forget she was a city cat. She’d settled down in the cobhouse and was growing sleek and round from a diet of birds and field mice and things I didn’t want to think about.

But I hated to see her get this independent. Most evenings I’d sneak a treat from my plate out to her. She often waited on the porch with her head cocked. Grandma knew. She had eyes in the back of her head.

Tonight, though, Bootsie wasn’t on the porch. There I was with a baking powder biscuit coming apart in my pocket. Then I heard a little sound, over by the spirea bushes. It was a clunking sound, followed by a small, piteous cry.

I hoped it wasn’t Bootsie and knew it was. I strained to see across the dark yard. Two green eyes caught the light from the kitchen. I called her and she came, or tried to. Bootsie bounded forward, then fell back and ran a circle around herself. I was down in the yard now, scooping her up. She clawed my shoulder and quivered. When I lifted her, a nasty old rusted-out tin can was tied tight to her tail by a length of twine.

Though she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen, I marched inside, holding her high. “Grandma! Look at this.” The can swung below Bootsie, and her tail looked all pinched. “If this is Halloween around here,” I said, “I don’t like it.”

Grandma just pursed her lips and took a pair of shears to the twine. “Now turn her out,” she said, pointing to the door. Grandma went back to the range to stir something. The kitchen was filling up with a terrible smell. Reluctantly, I spilled Bootsie out onto the back porch. When I turned around, the smell from the pan on the stove was enough to skin my eyes.

“Grandma, what is that?”

“Glue. Best glue you ever used, better than store-bought. It’ll bond wood to wood, metal to metal, and stay stuck till kingdom come.” She turned, gasping, from the stove. Her spectacles had steamed up, and her cheeks were wet. “We’ll need some picture wire.” She nodded to a drawer. “And a hammer. Not the tack hammer. The big one. And there’s a railroad spike around here somewheres.”

I knew not to ask. It was just better to go along with her.

By and by, we were trooping off the back porch, bundled up. I wore my plaid coat from last winter, which was short in the sleeves. It was a frosty night, with a ring around the moon. Grandma and I were shadows casting shadows down her back walk, past her sleeping garden and the clothesline.

“Busy, busy, busy,” Grandma muttered to herself. “Too much to do.” She carried the pan of glue. I carried the rest.

The cobhouse where Bootsie lived stood facing the privy at the end of the back walk. A Japanese lantern vine that grew up over the privy rattled in the night wind. Grandma’s privy was among the last left standing. The Halloweeners had struck as near as next door. That privy was just kindling now, scattered. And a plank with two holes in it, hanging down from the fence.

Setting down the smoldering glue, Grandma took the spike out of my hand. With two almighty hammer blows she drove it into the ground beside the cobhouse door. Winding the wire around the spike, she stretched it tight across the walk to tie it to the trunk of the Japanese lantern vine, about five inches off the ground. She was grunting and bent double.

“Find us a couple crates to sit on in there.” She nodded to the cobhouse. “This could take a while.”

The cobhouse was where Grandpa Dowdel had stored everything he’d ever owned. There was just room enough for Grandma and me on our crates, inside by the doorway. The pan of glue cooled at her feet. Bootsie found us. Though she didn’t like the glue smell, she sprang onto my lap, nuzzling for the baking powder biscuit. I doled it out to her and held her close to keep my hands warm.

It was so quiet, you could hear Bootsie chew, and from miles away came the mournful whistle of a freight train. But we were silent as the tomb. Nothing could seem more deserted than this cobhouse, that privy.

At last we heard them. Bumbling boys in a bunch, making their way down past the garden. Oh, how quiet they thought they were being, with their boot heels ringing on the walk and their noisy breathing. I tried to count heads, though it was too dark to see whose. There may have been only three, though they seemed like more. In my lap Bootsie was as still as a little statue. Beside me, Grandma was at one with the darkness.

We no sooner saw the first boy than the invisible wire caught him at the ankle. He pitched forward, and a word I can’t repeat burst out of him. He fell like a tree and measured his full length on the concrete walk. Nothing broke his fall but his nose.

There was scrambling. The boys behind him tried to stop, not knowing where their leader had gone. They only wondered for a moment.

Grandma lunged. As big as the cobhouse doorway, she surged through it. Moonlight struck her snow-white hair, and she looked eight feet tall. She’d have given a coroner a coronary. As the fallen boy raised his dazed head, she turned the pan of glue over on it. The glue was cool now and would set later.

He screamed, of course, and this too panicked the others. They ran into each other and the cobhouse wall. They tried to get away from Grandma. They may have thought she was a restless spirit. In a way, she was. They jibbered.

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