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 the grown-ups and old folks, under drooping twists of black and orange crepe paper.
Grandma filled the door, and people looked up in alarm and surprise. She was famous for keeping herself to herself, but she was everywhere at once, if you asked me. We parted the party like the Red Sea, bearing in our pies.
It was slim pickings on the refreshment table. A few popcorn balls, sticking to each other, two or three plates of fork cookies, a pan of fudge. The school board had provided a punch bowl of soft cider. Grandma cast her eyes over this bounty. “Good thing Effie Wilcox didn’t bring her angel food cake,” she observed, “or I’d have needed the handsaw to cut it.”
She was shucking off Grandpa Dowdel’s coat and turning back her sleeves. Of course she meant to serve up her pies herself. It was her moment of glory. We’d been working toward it all along.
Miss Butler appeared. She wore black sateen and a matching bow in her hair, which I personally thought was too perky for a teacher. “Why, Mrs. Dowdel,” she said, “how... nice.” Grandma wasn’t exactly a member of the PTA. “And what delicious-looking pies.”
“I’ll need a stack of paper plates,” Grandma said in reply.
Now people were lining up. Miss Butler found paper plates and throwaway forks, and two knives. Grandma and I began cutting up the pies. She could get more wedges out of a single pie than anyone I ever knew.
Mrs. Effie Wilcox was first in line. She was either Grandma’s best friend or her worst enemy, depending on the day. And she was an unusual-looking lady. Cross-eyed, and her teeth came forth to meet you. “Well, Effie,” Grandma said, “punkin or pecan?”
“Just a sliver of each,” Mrs. Wilcox said, looking everywhere. “I’m cuttin’ down.”
I was shocked at how the grown-ups pushed in first. But then here came Ina-Rae Gage, who always looked so wan and drawn that I cut her an extra-wide slice of pecan.
When she was past, Grandma muttered to me, “That’s the skinniest girl that ever I saw. She could rest in the shade of a clothesline.”
Most of the kids from the high school jostled by. Milton Grider and Forrest Pugh, Jr., shied past Grandma. Carleen Lovejoy deigned to let me serve her, followed by her simpering group—Gertrude and Irene Stemple and Mona Veech. Our pie supply held out pretty well as half the town trooped past. Then I saw the principal, Mr. August Fluke, bringing up the rear.
When he came even with Grandma, we beheld a fearful sight. Slumping in front of Mr. Fluke was Augie, his son. Augie was in high school with us. But you wouldn’t have known him. His head had been shaved and his scalp rubbed raw, beginning to scab. His bandaged nose was splayed all over his face. It was August Fluke, Jr., in a sorry state. Sullen too.
My jaw dropped. That skinned-up, bald head. That nose....
I couldn’t stand to look at him. Glancing down, I saw Grandma drop the knife she’d been using on the pies. She drew out of her apron pocket quite another knife, the one she’d found on the back walk by the privy. Somehow she managed to show the initials in its handle as she switched open the blade.
She plunged it into a pie and cut August Fluke, Jr., a slice with his own knife. Augie’s eyes narrowed. Mr. Fluke spied his son’s knife. Then his gaze traveled up to his son’s shaved dome. How long, I wondered, had it taken all the Flukes to get the worst of the glue off Augie’s head? That was glue that stuck till kingdom come.
Into Augie’s peeling ear, Mr. Fluke barked, “Boy, you done took on the wrong privy.”
Augie could see that Grandma meant to keep the knife. She looked past him to his dad, saying, “Punkin or pecan?”
To Grandma, Halloween wasn’t so much trick-or-treat as it was vittles and vengeance. Though she’d have called it justice.
As she said later, we fed the multitudes. It was like the loaves and the fishes, with pie for all. After we’d been worked off our feet, one pie eater came back, nosing for a second piece. She was a big-boned, full-voiced lady. “Mrs. Dowdel, I declare that was the best pumpkin pie I ever put in my mouth.”
Grandma could take compliments or leave them. “Who was that lady?” I asked her.
“Reba Pensinger,” she said, sidelong.
Before the evening was over, we of the younger set, except for Augie, bobbed for apples. I brought home a couple, and Grandma and I baked them with brown sugar.
A Minute in the Morning
I
hated sleeping upstairs in that big square room at Grandma’s. Joey wasn’t across the hall like the summers when we were kids. The mattress on the big brass bed had more craters than the moon. And you could barely see your hand in front of your face.
In Chicago it never really got dark, not like this. And the house was too quiet, though things scuttled in the walls. Once in a while a thumping sound came from overhead in the attic. I didn’t think Grandma’s house was haunted. What ghost would dare? But she slept downstairs to spare herself the climb, so I was miles from anybody.
What I’d have done without my radio, I don’t know. Grandma, who could hear all over the house, didn’t like extra noise, so I played the Philco at night in bed, muffled in the covers.
With radio, you never knew. I could only pick up the Chicago stations if there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it took a crisp, clear night to bring in KMOX from St. Louis. I didn’t listen to much news. Most of it was bad. They still couldn’t find Amelia Earhart, and ten million men were out of work. I knew my dad was one of them.
But I loved everything else on the radio. Baby Snooks. Fibber McGee and Molly. The A&P Gypsies. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Whispering Jack Smith.
The best thing about radio was that you couldn’t see anything, so you pictured it in your mind. All the men were just as handsome as movie stars—as Tyrone Power. And all the women were as beautiful as you hoped you’d be. Their voices were who they were, and the biggest voice belonged to Kate Smith, the Songbird of the South. That fall the whole country was singing her “When the moon comes over the mountain, every beam brings a dream, dear, of you.”
I’d lie there in the orange glow of the Philco dial, listening to the world. Then I’d see how fast I could fall asleep after I shut it off.
By November, I was cold. Wind howled in the eaves and found every chink in the house. With the window jammed shut, there was still a stiff breeze in the room, and I could see my breath. I took to wearing my old chenille bathrobe to bed over my pajamas. I considered wearing my plaid coat too, but thought I better save something back for winter. Finally, I made the mistake of complaining to Grandma.
You never saw a more surprised woman in your life. “Cold?” she said. “It doesn’t get cold anymore. The climate’s changed. When I was a girl, we had to walk in our sleep to keep from freezing to death.”
One morning after a hard frost, Grandma stood at the foot of the stairs, banging a spoon against a pan, her wake-up call.
When I came into the kitchen, dressed in three layers, she was pouring batter on the waffle iron, and coffee perked. She let me drink coffee. The scent of her cooking breakfasts was to follow me through life. But I was sulky that morning.