A Season of Gifts (11 page)

Jess Wood showed up, and there was some corn silk smoked outside behind the trucks. But a few of the eighth graders started a game that could have ended up with kissing, so a bunch of us went home. Jess did, and he could drive his dad’s truck himself.

Later that night there was a thumbnail of moon, a touch of winter in the hazy air. Phyllis and Ruth Ann were both in bed. Phyllis hadn’t gone anywhere, being grounded.
Ruth Ann had laid out all the treats she’d collected to show Grachel. Now she was sawing logs. I was at my window, still dressed from the party, waiting for whatever would happen next. Something was going to. You could feel it in the air.

The giant pumpkin glowed on Mrs. Dowdel’s front steps. Above the cobhouse roof hung the glow of a campfire dying down. Anyone trespassing on her melon patch would see a figure humped in afghans, a shotgun across her knees, sitting guard as promised.

Car horns still went off, but far away. Sudden gunfire from right next door would have come as no surprise, of course. It was like Fort Leonard Wood over there. But all was silence until the sudden snap of a kitchen door.

A cloud blurred the narrow moon. A large figure crossed the side yard, darker than night except for the white hair.

I was downstairs when Dad opened the door. Mrs. Dowdel was on the porch. But how could she be since she was sitting guard out in her melon patch?

But here she was, dressed in a complete outfit saved from her dead husband: canvas coat over overalls, gum boots, flap cap—hunting gear.

“Bagged him,” she said to Dad. “Call the law.”

We had a phone now. We had to. People kept calling up Dad to plan their future funerals. When he turned back to make the call, I slipped out. After all, an old lady shouldn’t be out at all hours, alone in the dark.

The corners of her dim kitchen were crowded with eerie
shapes like severed heads: pumpkins too ugly to sell she was saving for Thanksgiving pies. “Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder. “I got him tied to the leg of the bed.”

I kept on her heels up the linoleum steps. Her heavy tread rocked the house. Light fell from one of the bedrooms—her grandson’s: Joey’s.

She filled the doorway, and somebody in there yelped at another sight of her.

“Turn me loose,” a deep, whiny voice said. “I was just trick-or-treatin’ is all I was doin’.”

“With a crowbar and an ax in my upstairs bedroom?” she thundered. “You’re lookin’ at doin’ time, boy, in the state reformatory.” The gun hung broken over her canvas sleeve.

My heart thudded. Had she nailed him? Had he walked right into her trap through her unlocked front door past her blazing pumpkin? Had she finally got the goods on Roscoe Burdick?

I peered around her. There, kicking the bedroom floor on a rag rug between a crowbar and an ax—there with his wrists trussed up behind him and one ankle tied by fishing line to the leg of the bed, was Newt Fluke.

My heart sank.

Mrs. Dowdel had been gunning for Roscoe Burdick. But she’d bagged a Fluke. “Who sent you on this particular errand?”

“Nobody,” he muttered. “I thought it up my own self.”

“You ain’t had a thought of your own yet,” she remarked.

“And you know what you are?” Newt Fluke dared say from the floor, though his teeth chattered. There was no heat up here. “You’re a durned witch. How can you be out in your melon patch
and
up here, settin’ on this bed waitin’ for me? How can you be in two places at once? You’re a—”

“Boy,” she said, “I can be in three places if need be.”

Right about then we heard the siren on C. P. Snokes’s Dodge. I’d kept behind Mrs. Dowdel, trying to be invisible in case Newt ever got out on bail.

*  *  *

I was home then, before I was missed. From my window I watched C. P. Snokes cramming Newt Fluke into the backseat of the squad car.

Mrs. Dowdel stood in the headlight glare with her fists on her big hips. She looked about half satisfied. Then when the car door closed on Newt, she said to the police chief, “They’s another one in my snowballs.” She crooked a thumb at her house. Sure enough, another gangly figure exploded out of the snowball bushes by her bay window. He swerved for the road, lighting out for tall timber. They let him go. Around here, you can run, but you can’t hide. It was Elmo Leaper, Jr. He’d been left to stand guard while Newt went in to dig up the bedroom floor.

Halloween was finally petering out as the Dodge reversed into the road. I could hear Dad up in his attic study, trying to get back to his sermon. It might be Saturday already.

Then came a stealthy footfall on the stairs. I cracked my
door. Was Phyllis making a break for freedom? But it was Mother.

Mother, coming up, taking steps. I blinked to be sure. She looked kind of frost-bitten, though she was wearing several afghans. Weirder still, she carried a shotgun broken open over her arm. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Mother? Packing heat? Silent as snow she made for her room, and the door closed behind her.

Mother and Mrs. Dowdel . . . working hand in glove? I fell back on the bed, dizzy with what grown-ups can get up to. I drifted off into my usual dream. The one about going down for the third time in Salt Crick, sucking brown water and dragonflies, with Roscoe Burdick’s heavy hand on my head. But then I slept deeper than the crick, into November.

T
hanksgiving now, and Christmas coming. The last leaves burned in long piles in the ditches. White smoke rose through bare limbs like ancient Kickapoo campfires.

The second frost had killed the cannas, so there was nothing between us and Mrs. Dowdel.

She was too busy to sit down. “Busier than a one-armed paperhanger,” she claimed. “I’ll die standing up, like an old ox,” she said, another of her sayings.

She and Ruth Ann had made up little packets of suet to hang in the trees of the yard for the winter birds, the chickadees and cardinals. They tied them up in red and green ribbons, like Christmas presents coming early.

Now they were running a big lawn roller from somewhere,
back and forth to hull the black walnuts carpeting her yard. Walnuts for cookies to come. They’d cut the sage and hung it in bunches from the cobhouse beams, for Thanksgiving dressing. In her kitchen, wherever the pumpkins weren’t, were big dough bowls of bread crumbs, drying.

For their yard work, Mrs. Dowdel wore a pair of old cotton stockings pulled over her canvas coat sleeves, to keep out the draft. Ruth Ann was apt to burst into song while they worked. “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” and “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.”

At school there was a lot of talk about pilgrims, but then there always was, this time of year. Mrs. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, came to our class to tell about how either she or one of her ancestors had come over on the
Mayflower.

One thing I gave thanks for was that Newt Fluke had been taken out of sixth grade. He wasn’t doing time, even though Mrs. Dowdel had caught him red-handed. Instead, the coach, who was also the high school principal, promoted Newt to freshman year so he could play out the football season. The coach planned to build a new ground offense around him.

And without Newt, Elmo Leaper, Jr., wasn’t much. In fact he was kind of lonely. He came over to me one noon and said, “You wanna swap lunches?” He held up his bucket.
“Mine’s peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonder Bread.”

And I did because mine was corned beef and carrot sticks.

*  *  *

For a preacher’s family Thanksgiving is all about feeding the hungry. Mother and the Methodist Women’s Circle used the church as a gathering place for the food donations.

The church had new, top-of-the-line windows now, combination storms and screens.

Moore’s IGA store donated turkeys, and the DAR brought canned goods. Mrs. Weidenbach herself promised her famous candied yams. I had to beg various stores for boxes to pack the dinners in because we’d be delivering them to shut-ins.

Though Mrs. Dowdel was no church woman, she was in and out all Thanksgiving week, gradually taking over the entire Methodist Feed the Hungry Thanksgiving Campaign. She was everywhere Mother turned.

“Who’s baking them turkeys for you?” she demanded to know. When she heard it was Mrs. Pensinger, she said, “Reba Pensinger? Her turkey’s dry as the bottom of a canary cage, and you could lubricate your car with her pan gravy. I’ll do the birds in my oven. Have this boy bring them to the house.” Meaning me.

Also, she thought very little of cranberry sauce in a can. “I wouldn’t slop hogs with it. You can taste the can.” A
cauldron of bubbling, popping cranberries and orange peel seethed on her stove top, spiced with cinnamon sticks. As soon as school was over every afternoon, Ruth Ann stood on a kitchen chair and stirred.

Since Mrs. Pensinger didn’t need oven space for the turkeys, she baked two or three pumpkin pies and brought them over to the church. But she said her pumpkins had let her down and all the good ones had vanished from her patch. Mrs. Dowdel baked twenty pumpkin pies at least. She showed Ruth Ann how to roll out dough and how to keep a bottom crust from getting soggy in the middle. Three mountains of dressing grew in her kitchen: chestnut, oyster, and cornbread.

The Methodist men volunteered to deliver the dinners on Thanksgiving Day. Broshear’s Funeral Home offered their hearse. But Dad thought it might send the wrong message to people who saw it turning in at their place.

Somehow Mrs. Dowdel was in our car with us when we headed out. She hadn’t dressed up. She wore her kitchen apron under her hunting jacket. Ruth Ann was in the backseat with her, also aproned. Dad was behind the wheel, and I sat beside him, where I liked to be. The whole Pickle smelled like turkey and cranberries and baked-this-morning Parker House rolls. Mrs. Dowdel gave us the directions to Aunt Madge’s house, whoever she was. Mrs. Dowdel had been particular about us calling on Aunt Madge.

“Who is she anyway?” Ruth Ann wanted to know. “Is she a poor old widow woman?”

“Well, she’s poor all right, and old as the hills.” Mrs. Dowdel pondered. “Though I don’t know as you could call her a widow woman. Nobody in that family ever got around to marrying.”

“Then is she an old maid?” Ruth Ann inquired.

“Well, I don’t know as you could call her that either,” Mrs. Dowdel muttered.

Dad was all ears for whatever he could hear from up front. We spun along a county road through the frosty fields. I watched him work through the gears on the Pickle. He was inclined to ride the clutch a little. Mrs. Dowdel reached up to poke his shoulder. “Make a left at that Burma-Shave sign, Preacher.”

We were about five miles out now and getting down to one lane, then a track, then two ruts. Up a turning was what looked like a large junkyard, and the fence was down. “Turn up that lane,” Mrs. Dowdel directed, and Dad geared down.

The house itself lurked low, and the roof was patched with Coca-Cola signs. We all helped to carry Aunt Madge’s Thanksgiving dinner. “Go on in,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “She don’t lock up.”

Inside was a lot like outside and somewhat colder. You could see your breath. Dad had to duck in the doorway.
The floor wasn’t all there. Then over by a stove a pile of rags became an old, old woman in a La-Z-Boy recliner.