A Long Way From Chicago (6 page)

1931

A
Great Depression had swept over the nation, and we couldn’t seem to throw it off. It was still Hoovering over us, as people said. It hadn’t bottomed out yet, but it was heading that way.

You could see hard times from the window of the Wabash Blue Bird. The freight trains on the siding were loaded down with men trying to get from one part of the country to another, looking for work and something to eat. Mary Alice and I watched them as they stood in the open doors of the freight cars. They were walking along the right-of-way too, with nothing in their hands.

Then when we got off the train at Grandma’s, a new sign on the platform read:

DRIFTERS KEEP MOVING

THIS MEANS YOU

(SIGNED) O. B. DICKERSON, SHERIFF

But at Grandma’s house it seemed to be business as usual. Mary Alice was still skittish about the old snaggletoothed tomcat in the cobhouse. Grandma said if he worried her that much, she ought to use the chamber pot in place of the privy. Chamber pots were under all the beds, and they were handy at night. But Mary Alice wouldn’t use hers during the day. She didn’t want to climb the stairs just for that. And she didn’t want to have to empty it any more than necessary.

Being nine, Mary Alice decided to take charge. She carried a broom to the privy, to swat the cat if it gave her any trouble. She was soon back that first afternoon, dragging the broom. Her eyes were watering, and she was holding her nose. “Something died in the cobhouse,” she said.

“Naw,” Grandma said. “It’s cheese.”

“I don’t want any,” Mary Alice said.

“It’s not for you,” Grandma said.

Now that they mentioned it, I could smell something pretty powerful wafting into the kitchen. And I could see the old tomcat from here, stretched out in the yard. He was breathing hard and nowhere near the cobhouse. The cheese smelled bad enough to gas a cat, but it was no use asking what it was for. We were bound to find out.

Grandma’s house was the last one in town. Next to the row of glads was a woven-wire fence, and on the other side of that a cornfield. On the first nights I’d always lie
up in bed, listening to the husky whisper of the dry August corn in the fields. Then on the second night I wouldn’t hear anything.

But this year came the sound of shuffling boots and sometimes a voice. The Wabash tracks that cut the town in two ran along the other side of the road. The sheriff’s deputies were out, carrying shotguns, moving the drifters along, so they didn’t hang around town to beg for food. From my window I watched the swaying lanterns, and ahead of them the slumping figures of the drifters, heading for the next town. It was kind of spooky, and sad.

But it was a short night. At five the next morning Grandma was at the foot of the stairs, banging a spoon against a pan. When we got down to the kitchen, we found her in a pair of men’s overalls stuffed into gum boots. She couldn’t go outdoors in overalls, so she’d pulled a wash dress on over them, and her apron over that. Crowning it all was her gardening hat. She’d anchored it with a veil to keep the mosquitoes away, and tied it under her chins. She looked like a moving mountain. Mary Alice couldn’t believe the overalls.

“Keeps off the chiggers,” Grandma explained. “We’re going fishing.”

I looked around for the rods and reels, at least some bamboo poles, but didn’t see anything.

“It’s just one thing after another in town,” Grandma declared. “We wasn’t over Decoration Day before it was the Fourth of July. Then come the Old Settlers’ picnic. You can’t hardly get down the street for the crowds, and the dust never settles. I need me a day off and some peace and quiet.”

Fresh from the Chicago Loop, Mary Alice and I traded glances.

We didn’t linger over breakfast because of the smell. The cheese was on the back porch now, in a gunnysack. It began to dawn on me that it was the kind of cheese catfish consider a delicacy.

Grandma was ready to go, and when she was ready, you’d better be. “Let’s get on the road,” she said, taking a last look around the kitchen. “Douse the fire and hide the ax and skillet.”

We blinked.

“Just a saying,” Grandma said. “A country saying. I was a country girl, you know.”

She carried the gunnysack of cheese herself, tied to the end of a tree limb hitched up on her shoulder. I was in charge of the picnic hamper, and it took all I had to lift it. I looked inside. Half the hamper was home-canned fruit: tomatoes and pickled peaches. The other half was vegetables from her garden: snap beans, four turnips, a cabbage. The only thing that looked like a picnic was a loaf of unsliced, home-baked bread. But I didn’t ask. Grandma saved herself a lot of bother by not being the kind of person you question.

We trooped out into the morning behind her. As soon as we left her yard, we were in the country, but I had the feeling it could be a long trip. The hamper weighed a ton, and I had no luck in getting Mary Alice to carry the other handle.

We were well covered against chiggers, and the day was already too hot. Mary Alice preferred skirts, but she
had on her playsuit with the long pants. Being eleven, I was way too old for shorts anyway, so I had on my jeans. We marched behind Grandma, and it wasn’t too bad until the sun came up over the tassels on the corn.

We ate the dust of the road for a mile or so. Of course being a city boy, I didn’t know what a mile was, but it felt like a mile. At a stand of timber we veered across a pasture.

“Watch your step,” Grandma said. “Cow pies aplenty.”

We were making for Salt Creek, and pretty soon the trees along the creek began to show on the horizon. But they were like a mirage that keeps its distance.

Finally we came to a barbed-wire fence with a sign on it:

NO TRESPASSING WHATSOEVER
NO FISHING, NOTHIN
PRIVATE PROPERTY
OF
PIATT COUNTY ROD & GUN CLUB

(SIGNED) O. B. DICKERSON, SHERIFF

“Lift that wire so I can skin under,” Grandma said.

The lowest wire was pretty close to the ground. But Grandma was already flat on her back in the weeds. She’d pushed the cheese through. Now she began to work her shoulders to inch herself under. I pulled up on the wire to the best of my ability, but there wasn’t much slack to it. The barbs snagged her hat, though they cleared her nose. But now here came her bosom. Mary Alice stood by,
sucking in her own small chest, hoping to help. The wire cut my hand, and I was stabbed three times by the barbs. But like a miracle, Grandma shimmied under. Mary Alice followed with plenty of room, though she didn’t like to get burrs in her hair.

Being a boy, I climbed the wires and pivoted over on a fence post, on the heel of my wounded hand. I dragged the hamper through, and now we were in forbidden territory. It all looked overgrown and deserted to me. But Grandma, speaking low, said, “Hush up from here on, and keep just behind me.”

We were in trees and tall grass. As we sloped to the creek bottoms, the ground grew soggy underfoot. Dragonflies skated over the scum on the stagnant backwater. Grandma made her way along the willows weeping into the water. When she pulled back a tangle of vines, we saw an old, worn-out, snub-nosed rowboat. It was pulled up and tied to a tree, and the oars were shipped in the wet bottom, beside a long pole with a steel hook at the end.

“Work that rope loose,” Grandma whispered to me. She pointed for Mary Alice to climb aboard, and she followed, reaching back to me for the hamper. The knot was easy, but pushing the boat out with Grandma in it wasn’t. By the time the boat was afloat, I was up to my shoetops in muddy water.

I never thought for a minute that this was Grandma’s boat. But she was one expert rower. She had the oars in the locks, and they pulled the water with hardly a ripple. She turned us and rowed along the bank, under the low-hanging
limbs. We were on our way somewhere, quiet as the morning.

I was in the back of the boat, lolling, my mind drifting. Then I got the scare of my life. A low limb writhed and looped. I caught a quick glimpse of sliding scales and an evil eye, maybe a fang. Then an enormous snake dropped into the boat.

It just missed Grandma’s lap and fell hissing between her and me. The last thing I saw was this thing, thick as a tire, snapping into a coil.

When I came to, we were tied up to a sapling, and Grandma was crouched over me. She was applying a rag wet with creek water to my forehead. Mary Alice was behind her, looking round-eyed at me.

“You fainted, Joey,” she accused.

Boys don’t faint. I passed out, and it was probably mostly the heat. Sunstroke maybe. Then I remembered the snake and grabbed up my knees.

“Never mind,” Grandma said. “It’s gone. It was harmless. Good-sized, but harmless. There’s cottonmouths around though, so I’d keep my hands in the boat if I was you.”

“It was swell,” Mary Alice said. “It was
keen.
You should have seen how Grandma grabbed it up by its tail and snapped it just once and broke its neck.”

It was all neck, if you asked me.

“Then she hauled off and flung it way out in the water,” Mary Alice went on relentlessly. “Grandma’s something with snakes. You should have seen—”

“Okay, okay,” I muttered. Grandma stifled a rare smile. I suspected she had no high opinion of the bravery of the male sex, and I hadn’t done anything to change her mind. Why wasn’t it Mary Alice who’d done the fainting? It bothered me off and on for years.

We were under way again, me keeping a sharp eye on low-hanging limbs. I was recovering from everything but embarrassment, and Grandma was rowing out from the bank. Now she was putting up the oars and standing in the boat. It rocked dangerously, though she planted her big boots as wide as the sides allowed. She reached down for the long rod with the hook at the end.

Glancing briefly into the brown water, she plunged the rod into the creek. It hit something, and she began to pull the rod back up, hand over hand. She was weaving to keep her balance in the tipping boat. I wanted to hang on to the sides, but pictured a cottonmouth rearing up and sinking fangs in my hand.

Something broke the surface of the creek, something on a chain Grandma had hooked. It was bigger than the picnic hamper and looked like an orange crate, streaming water. And inside: whipping tails and general writhing.

I thought of cottonmouths and ducked. But they were catfish, mad as hornets, who’d been drawn by Grandma’s terrible cheese. She heaved in the crate and unlatched the top. In the bottom of the boat was a wire-and-net contraption that expanded as she filled it with wiggling fish. A catfish is the ugliest thing with gills, and even Mary Alice drew back her feet. Grandma kept at it, bent double
in the boat. She was as busy as a bird dog, one of her own favorite sayings. When all the catfish were in the net, flopping their last in the bottom of the boat, she took the new cheese out of the gunnysack and stuck it in the crate.

“Grandma, how did you remember where it was?” I said, amazed. “You couldn’t see it, but you snagged it with the hook right off.”

“Remembered where I’d sunk it,” she said briefly. Now she was lowering the empty crate, baited with cheese, back in the water. Except it wasn’t a crate. It was a fish trap. Where we went in Wisconsin to fish, using a fish trap carried a five-dollar fine.

“Grandma,” I said, “is trapping fish legal in this state?”

“If it was,” she said, “we wouldn’t have to be so quiet.”

“What’s the fine?”

“Nothin’ if you don’t get caught,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s not my boat.” Which was an example of the way Grandma reasoned. “Them critters love that cheese,” she said fondly as the trap sank from view. She bent over the side to try to wash the smell off her hands, nearly swamping the boat.

Soon we were gliding gently downstream, Grandma rowing easy. The catfish were at her feet, flopping less now.

My brain buzzed. Dad was a dedicated fisherman. He tied his own flies. He was a member of the Conservation Club. What if he knew his own mother ran illegal fish traps? Brewing home beer was one thing, because the Prohibition law only profited the bootleggers. But we’re
talking about good sportsmanship here.