A Long Way From Chicago (19 page)

The Cowgills’ overworked old horse dragging our hayframe didn’t notice. It clopped on and ran into Mrs.
Weidenbach’s float. We bumped. I reached for Mary Alice to keep her from tangling in her skirts and pitching off the float. Mrs. Wilcox teetered on her stool.

Of course Mrs. Weidenbach knew we were right behind her, crabbing her act with an older settler than her daddy. And her reciting nephew had finished out of the money at the talent show, so she was already upset and off her feed with us.

But now her old daddy turned around and looked back. He may not have known where he was, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight. He read our sign over Uncle Grady, and his old pink eyes narrowed. He spoke sharply to his daughter, who laid a restraining hand on him.

Then it all happened quick. Mrs. Weidenbach’s daddy slipped free of her, leaped out of his kitchen chair, and jumped off their float. He cocked his forage cap at a dangerous angle and stalked back to our hayframe.

Glaring up at Uncle Grady, he howled, “You yellow-bellied old buzzard, if you’d fought in the Mexican War, we’d have lost!”

Seeming to consider this, Uncle Grady gazed down. Then he hollered, “Them’s fighting words, and I declare war!” Before Grandma could stop him, he charged off his throne, balanced a moment on the edge of our float, and threw himself into space. He lit on Mrs. Weidenbach’s daddy, and they both rolled in the street, locked in combat. Their medals and weaponry clanged like wild bells ringing out.

“Don’t use the sword, Uncle Grady!” Grandma cried.

By now the Wabash Blue Bird should have pulled out. But all the passengers were at the windows, staring at this spectacle. Two of the oldest men alive were brawling in the street, tangled up in each other and Uncle Grady’s sword, their small fists throwing punches. Now they were so covered in dust and droppings, you couldn’t tell one uniform from the other. In the distance from the other side of town the last of the high-school bands blared “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

At length Mrs. Weidenbach separated the two old warriors, though her hoopskirt got in the way. Grandma would have let them fight it out.

She came to the depot to see us off on the day we left. It was to be our last visit together, and I suppose she knew. But she didn’t say so.

As the Blue Bird appeared down the tracks, I had something to ask her. “Grandma, there’s a loose end in my mind.”

“Well, don’t trip over it,” she said.

“How do you know Uncle Grady Griswold is a hundred and three years old?”

“How do you know he’s not?” She held her spidery old black umbrella between herself and the sun.

“What I mean is, does he have a birth certificate or something like that?”

“A birth certificate?” She waved me away. “They didn’t have birth certificates in them days. You were just born, and people accepted it.”

But now the train was pulling in, hissing steam, so
that was her last word. As Mary Alice and I scrambled aboard, Grandma heaved up a picnic hamper for us.

We were hardly out of town before we were both slumped half-asleep in the seat. A trip to Grandma really took it out of you. Dozing, I heard a mew. I looked down at our feet to see the lid rising on the picnic hamper. Two green eyes peered out.

I shot a look at Mary Alice, who was only pretending to be asleep. “What’s that?”

She blinked in surprise at the green eyes blinking back. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “It’s the kitten. Poor little thing. It took her three days to find her way back from Uncle Grady’s to the cobhouse. Grandma must have stuck her in the hamper, meaning me to have her. What a surprise.”

“And yet you don’t look too surprised.”

“You could knock me over with a feather.” Mary Alice sniffed, and lifted the kitten onto her lap.

“How do you know Mother’s going to let you keep that kitten?”

“How do you know she’s not?” said Mary Alice.

And we steamed on, riding the Wabash Blue Bird, bound for Chicago across the patchwork fields.

1942

T
he years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. Another war came, World War II, and I wanted to get in it. The war looked like my chance to realize my old dream of flying. My soul began to swoop as it had all those years ago at the county fair when I’d had my first ride in Barnie Buchanan’s biplane. I only hoped the war would last long enough to make a flier out of me, and so it did.

I joined up at Fort Sheridan for the Army Air Corps. But before I could go to flight school, I had to do basic training down at Camp Leonard Wood.

On the night we were shipping out from Dearborn Station, it occurred to me that the troop train would pass through Grandma’s town, sometime in the night. I
sent her a telegram. She never did have a phone. A telegram might give her a turn, but I just wanted to tell her the train would be going through town, though it wouldn’t stop.

In the way of troop trains, we left an hour late and sat on the siding outside Joliet for another hour. You don’t get any sleep on a troop train. Our car was blue with smoke and noisy with a floating crap game. I sat through the long night, propped at the window.

Then I knew we were getting to Grandma’s town. It was sound asleep in the hour before dawn. We slowed past the depot, and now we were coming to Grandma’s, the last house in town. It was lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. Every window upstairs and down blazed, though she always turned out the light when she left a room. Now we were rolling past, and there was Grandma herself.

She stood at her door, large as life—larger, framed against the light from her front room. Grandma was there, watching through the watches of the night for the train to pass through. She couldn’t know what car I was in, but her hand was up, and she was waving—waving big at all the cars, hoping I’d see.

And I waved back. I waved long after the window filled with darkness and long distance.

O
h, didn’t I feel sorry for myself when the Wabash Railroad’s Blue Bird train steamed into Grandma’s town. The sandwich was still crumbs in my throat because I didn’t have the dime for a bottle of pop. They wanted a dime for pop on the train.

My trunk thumped out onto the platform from the baggage car ahead. There I stood at the end of the world with all I had left. Bootsie and my radio.

Bootsie was my cat, with a patch of white fur on each paw. She’d traveled in a picnic hamper. Bootsie had come from down here, two summers ago when she was a kitten. Now she was grown but scrawny. She’d spent the trip trying to claw through the hamper. She didn’t like change any more than I did.

My portable radio was in my other hand. It was a Philco with a leatherette cover and handle. Portable radios weighed ten pounds in those days.

As the train pulled out behind me, there came Grandma up the platform steps. My goodness, she was a big woman. I’d forgotten. And taller still with her spidery old umbrella held up to keep off the sun of high noon. A fan of white hair escaped the big bun on the back of her head. She drew nearer till she blotted out the day.

You couldn’t call her a welcoming woman, and there wasn’t a hug in her. She didn’t put out her arms, so I had nothing to run into.

Nobody had told Grandma that skirts were shorter this year. Her skirttails brushed her shoes. I recognized the dress. It was the one she put on in hot weather to walk uptown in. Though I was two years older, two years taller than last time, she wasn’t one for personal comments. The picnic hamper quivered, and she noticed. “What’s in there?”

“Bootsie,” I said. “My cat.”

“Hoo-boy,” Grandma said. “Another mouth to feed.” Her lips pleated. “And what’s that thing?” She nodded to my other hand.

“My radio.” But it was more than a radio to me. It was my last touch with the world.

“That’s all we need.” Grandma looked skyward. “More noise.”

She aimed one of her chins down the platform. “That yours?” She meant the trunk. It was the footlocker Dad had brought home from the Great War.

“Leave it,” she said. “They’ll bring it to the house.” She turned and trudged away, and I was supposed to follow. I walked away from my trunk, wondering if I’d ever see it again. It wouldn’t have lasted long on the platform in Chicago. Hot tongs wouldn’t have separated me from Bootsie and my radio.

The recession of thirty-seven had hit Grandma’s town harder than it had hit Chicago. Grass grew in the main street. Only a face or two showed in the window of The Coffee Pot Cafe. Moore’s Store was hurting for trade. Weidenbach’s bank looked to be just barely in business.

On the other side of the weedy road, Grandma turned the wrong way, away from her house. Two old slab-sided dogs slept on the sidewalk. Bootsie knew because she was having a conniption in the hamper. And my radio was getting heavier. I caught up with Grandma.

“Where are we going?”

“Going?” she said, the picture of surprise. “Why, to school. You’ve already missed pretty nearly two weeks.”

“School!” I’d have clutched my forehead if my hands weren’t full. “On my first day here?”

Grandma stopped dead and spoke clear. “You’re going to school. I don’t want the law on me.”

“Grandma, the law’s afraid of you. You’d grab up that shotgun from behind the woodbox if the sheriff came on your place.”