A Long Way From Chicago (15 page)

The sale was in the church basement. The air was battered by funeral parlor fans, and ladies were picking over long tables. Some were still bringing in their treasures and trash. Others were snatching things up and taking them
to the cashier’s card table to pay for them. A sharp scent of potato salad hung in the air, but the Ladies’ Circle had cleared away lunch. Now they were bringing out pitchers of free lemonade.

Everybody looked up when Grandma loomed into the room, as people always did. Several pulled back, but a tall, strict-looking lady came forth. “Why, goodness, it’s Mrs. Dowdel,” she said.

Grandma made short work of her by handing over the grocery bag and nodding at the quilt, which I offered up.

Mary Alice went for a look at the merchandise. But the tables were surrounded by flying elbows, so I settled next to Grandma. She was on a folding chair, pouring herself a glass of lemonade. She had a way of sitting with her feet apart and her hands on her knees. After a good long swig of lemonade, she observed the scene. In fact, she was biding her time. Somehow I knew this.

A flurry began at the other end of a table. From their hats, they were all town ladies, not country. A hiss of whispers whipped up into raised voices. Grandma sat on, at her ease.

Then the strict lady in charge, who was Mrs. Earl T. Askew, came through the crowds, heading for us. Mrs. Askew’s face had gone vampire white.

Bending to Grandma, she spoke in low, urgent tones. “Mrs. Dowdel, I feel I must tell you that Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, has offered
fifteen dollars
for that stovepipe hat.”

She stared at Grandma for a reaction and got nothing back.

“Mrs. Dowdel, are you one-hundred-percent sure you want to part with that hat?”

“It don’t belong to me.” Grandma made a small gesture. “I have an idea it was in with some other old stuff Effie Wilcox threw away when the bank run her out of town.”

Mrs. Askew’s gaze was electric. “Other old stuff?” She seemed to have trouble breathing.

Grandma nodded. “Just old clutter Effie had found in the house back when she moved in.”

Mrs. Askew pivoted like a dancer and was gone. Already Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach was over at the cashier, peeling off five-dollar bills as fast as she could dig them out of her pocketbook.

Oh, Grandma, I thought, what have you done?

Mrs. Askew plunged back. Aunt Josie Smull’s quilt was clutched in her arms like a long-lost child. “Mrs. Dowdel,” she said, “oh, Mrs. Dowdel, are you one-hundred-percent—”

Grandma took the quilt onto her lap, smoothed it out, and looked it over. A crowd gathered. There in the corner, worked in faded thread, initials had magically appeared on the fraying hem:

M·T·L·

Suddenly, Mrs. Weidenbach appeared, gripping the preacher’s stovepipe hat. She went right for Mrs. Askew. “What have you got there? Let me—”

“Not so fast, Wilhelmina,” Mrs. Askew snapped. “I
seen—saw it first.” She swept up the quilt that Grandma gladly surrendered.

“What are those initials?” Mrs. Weidenbach was beside herself. “Oh my stars and garters! M.T.L. Mary Todd Lincoln! And I’ve got Abe Lincoln’s own stovepipe hat. His name’s lettered in on the sweatband!”

Two things happened that next morning. A car from out of town backfired in the vicinity of the bank, and everybody on the sidewalk dropped down and grabbed gravel. Who knew but what John Dillinger was alive and well and up to his old tricks?

The other thing was a knock at Grandma’s front door right after breakfast. Mary Alice and I followed when she went to answer it, opening to a stringy young guy in a seersucker suit.

“Well, Otis,” she said, “what?”

“Ma’am,” he said, “Mr. Weidenbach would be pleased if you could spare him a moment of your time at your earliest convenience.”

Grandma stepped back and clutched her throat, showing shock. “Don’t tell me the bank’s failed. Banks is failing all over. Had I better draw out my funds? Is there time?”

“No, ma’am, the bank’s still in business.” Otis looked down at his boots. “Your seventeen dollars is safe.”

“You give me a turn!” she said, slapping at her bosom and shutting the door in his face.

She waited an hour and a half. Then she put on her gardening hat and went uptown to the bank. Mary Alice and
I went with her. When we got to the business block, people were still just getting up off the sidewalk. The bank was store-sized, and the only teller was Otis, back in his cage. He waved us through to the rear office, beside the safe.

I’d never seen Mr. Weidenbach before, but this couldn’t have been one of his better days. Over his head on the wall above the desk was a widemouthed bass, stuffed. “You will have to excuse me,” he boomed, showing us chairs. “This crackbrained rumor that Dillinger is still alive is doing our business no good.”

“If it’s a rumor at all,” said Grandma, on her dignity and then some. “A rumor is sometimes truth on the trail.”

“I am interested to hear you say so, Mrs. Dowdel.” The banker pulled the purse strings of his mouth taut. “It brings us to the point.”

“Get right to it,” Grandma said.

“Certain items supposedly from the estate of President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln have surfaced in a house the bank is forced to foreclose on. Do you grasp what this could mean, Mrs. Dowdel?”

Grandma thought she did. “I expect the state will take that land and restore the house as a museum. I hear a rumor Lincoln debated Douglas in that very parlor. Rumor has it he split the rails for the fence that used to enclose the brickyard.”

“And who’s been circulating such cockeyed rumors?” The banker turned a deeper color.

“Who knows where a rumor starts?” Grandma mused. “Who knows where it’ll end? They’ve very likely heard it
at the statehouse in Springfield by now. I have an idea they’ll send over a historian any day now to snoop.”

“Mrs. Dowdel, the bank has signed papers with Deere and Company to build an implement shed across that entire property and the site of the old brickyard too. Any delay throws a monkey wrench in the deal. Better times are on the way, and what’s good for a bank is good for the community.”

“But a nice state park wouldn’t be bad either,” Grandma pondered. “We could all set out on summer evenings, recalling Honest Abe. That park we got now is just wasteland the Wabash Railroad didn’t want.”

Mr. Weidenbach’s gaping mouth hung near his blotter now. He had his desktop in a death grip. “Mrs. Dowdel, you falsified those so-called Lincoln items. They’re bogus. I could have the law on you.”

“That’s right.” Grandma gazed above him at the widemouthed bass. “The banker throws the poor old widder in the pokey. That’ll look real good for your business.”

Mr. Weidenbach was smaller now, deflated. “Mrs. Dowdel,” he said in a voice strangled with emotion, “help me out of this. I’m in too deep with John Deere. I got to go forward because I can’t do otherwise.”

“Lop off your back end,” Grandma said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Build a shorter implement shed over the old brickyard, and leave Effie Wilcox’s house be.”

A glimmer of hope showed in the banker’s hard eye.

“I suppose we could go back to the drawing board and reallocate our square footage.”

“Do that,” Grandma said. “And one more thing. You
give Effie Wilcox back her house, free and clear. It isn’t worth nothing anyway—apart from its historical value.”

“Mrs. Dowdel, that’s not business,” the banker said. “That’s blackmail.”

“What’s the difference?” Grandma said.

A silence was observed. Then banker Weidenbach turned up his hands. “All right. It’s Mrs. Wilcox’s house, free and clear. But you’ll have to confess you falsified those so-called Lincoln items. Fair’s fair.”

“Oh well.” Grandma sketched a casual pattern in the air with one hand. “We can get that rumor going right now. Effie didn’t mean to put Lincoln’s name in the stovepipe hat. I—she just lettered in ‘A Lincoln’ to mean it was the kind of hat he wore.”

Mary Alice and I exchanged a look across Grandma.

“And that M.T.L. on the quilt. Pshaw!” Grandma said. “Effie Wilcox had a cousin, name of Maude Teeter Lingenbloom. That’s M.T.L. for you.”

Mr. Weidenbach replied in an exhausted voice, “I’ll get the word out.”

Grandma was on her feet now. She patted the bun of her back hair under the nibbled brim. “Free and clear, you got that?” she said to Mr. Weidenbach. “Effie don’t make no more payments on that house.” Then as if a sudden thought struck her, she nudged me. “And you can give this boy here a two-dollar bill.” She nudged Mary Alice. “And fair’s fair. Give this girl two dollars too.”

“That’s big money for young’uns,” the banker said. “Shall I draw it out of your account, Mrs. Dowdel?”

“No, you double-dealing, four-flushing old cootie,” she replied. “You can draw it out of your own wallet. Any
man with a wife who’ll pay fifteen dollars for an old preacher’s moth-eaten stovepipe hat has four bucks to spare.”

Silent wars seemed to wage in Mr. Weidenbach’s brain. Then he pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket. He kept a bootlace tied around it. We watched as he drew out a pair of two-dollar bills and handed them to Mary Alice and me. And heaven help us, we took them.

Rumors are things with wings too. The rumor that I had two dollars reached Ray Veech before I could. He was going to have to give me my driving lessons at the end of the day when he was sure his dad was out on the farm, milking. Otherwise, his dad would take a cut. Also, we needed to use the Terraplane 8, which was strictly forbidden under an agreement with the Hudson Motor Car Company.

I started off to Ray’s that evening with a two-dollar bill in my jeans and a song in my heart. I felt like I was six feet tall and shaved. My right hand played through the gearshift positions, and I was ready.

Then Grandma called out after me that she and Mary Alice were going along for the ride.

And how could I explain to Grandma that learning to drive was kind of a sacred thing, and you don’t want your kid sister and your grandma along?

Grandma filled most of the backseat of the Terraplane. Mary Alice sat beside her with an unspent two-dollar bill in her pocketbook. From Grandma, Mary Alice was learning
thrift. She could squeeze two cents till they begged for mercy, let alone two dollars.

Ray was up front with me, and I was behind the wheel. I’d crept out of town in second gear, and now Ray was showing me third. I knew if I got so much as a scratch on the fender, I was a dead man, so that kept me alert. And I stayed to the crown of the road, hoping not to meet anything oncoming. Visors flipped down to keep the setting sun out of our eyes. It was a car with every refinement. And though I wasn’t steering straight yet, I was beginning to get the feel of the thing. The Terraplane and I were becoming as one. I no longer let the motor die at crossroads.

After we made it across the plank bridge over Salt Creek, Ray reached down and turned the radio to WGN. Out of static came the sweet strains of cocktail hour music from the Empire Room of the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. It was a modern miracle. Here we were skimming along a country road out past Cowgills’ Dairy Farm, and we were hearing music being played in the Chicago Loop.