A Long Way From Chicago

by Richard Peck

  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.

  I noticed Mary Alice’s eyes on me. She was watching me around Grandma’s rowing arm, and she was reading my mind. It was then we decided never to tell Dad.

  You could say one thing for Grandma’s method. You got all your fishing done at once. It wasn’t later than eight o’clock, and maybe we’d gotten away with it. It seemed to me we ought to have brought some poles along, and a can of worms, considering our catch. But I thought maybe things would settle down now, and we could have the quiet day in the country Grandma wanted. Then we heard singing.

  I almost jumped out of the boat. It had felt as if we three were alone in the world. Now this singing warbled up from around a bend in the creek, like a bad barbershop quartet with extra voices chiming in:

  Camptown ladies sing this song,

  Doo-dah, doo-dah. . . .

  Grandma nudged the boat into the bank just where the creek began to bend. Through the undergrowth we saw a ramshackle building on the far bank. Above the porch was a sign, a plank with words burned in:

  ROD & GUN CLUB

  A row of empty whisky bottles stood on the porch rail and from behind them came the singing:

  Bet my money on the bobtail nag,

  Somebody bet on the bay.

  The porch sagged with singers—grown men in their underwear, still partying from last night. Old guys in real droopy underwear. It was a grisly sight, and Mary Alice’s eyes bugged. I wasn’t sure she ought to be seeing this. They were waving bottles and trying to dance. I didn’t know what they’d do next. Grandma was fascinated.

  As we watched, a skinny old guy with a deputy’s badge pinned to his long johns stepped forth and was real sick over the rail into the water.

  “Earl T. Askew,” Grandma muttered, “president of the Chamber of Commerce.”

  But now a fat old geezer in the droopiest drawers and nothing else pulled himself up on the porch rail. Bottles toppled into the water as he stood barefoot on the rail, teetering back, then forward, while the others behind him roared, “Whoa, whoa.”

  “Shut up a minute,” he roared back at them, “and I’ll sing you a good song.” He took a slug out of the bottle in his fist, and began:

  The night that Paddy Murphy died

  I never shall forget.

  The whole durn town got stinkin’ drunk,

  And some ain’t sober yet.

  The only thing they done that night

  That filled my heart with fear,

  They took the ice right off the corpse

  And put it in the beer.

  Then he fell back into the arms of the cheering crowd.

  “Ain’t that disgusting?” Grandma said. “He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

  “Who is he?” I whispered.

  “O. B. Dickerson, the sheriff,” she said, “and them drunk skunks with him is the entire business community of the town.”

  Mary Alice gasped. The drawers on some of the business community were riding mighty low. “They’re not acting right,” she said, very prim.

  “Men in a bunch never do,” Grandma said.

  They were tight enough to fight too, and we were on their private property. Not only that. We were in a boat full of trapped fish almost under the bloodshot eye of the sheriff. I thought it was time to head upstream as fast as Grandma could row.

  But no. She jammed an oar into the bank to push us off. Then she began rowing around the bend. My heart stopped. The full chorus was singing again, louder as we got nearer.

  Sweet Adeline, old pal of mine. . . .

  The Rod & Gun Club came into view, and so did we. Mary Alice was perched in the bow. Grandma was rowing steady, and I was in the stern, wondering if the fish showed.

  It took the drunks on the porch a moment to focus on us. We were sailing right past them now, smooth as silk, big as life.

  You’re the flower of my heart, Sweet Ad—

  They saw us.

  And Grandma saw them, as if for the first time. She seemed to lose control of the oars, and her mouth fell open in shock. Mary Alice was already shocked and didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t know where to look.

  Some of the business community were so far gone, they just stared back, unbelieving. They thought they owned this stretch of the creek. A few, seeing that Grandma and Mary Alice were of the opposite sex, scrambled to hide themselves behind the others.

  But you never saw anybody looking as scandalized as Grandma was at these old birds in their union suits and less. She was speechless as her gaze passed over them all, recognizing everybody.

  It was a silent scene until Sheriff O. B. Dickerson found his voice. “Stop in the name of the law!” he bellowed. “That’s my boat!”

  Before the Rod & Gun Club was out of sight, Grandma had regained control of the oars. She rowed on as if none of this had ever happened. The sun was beating down, so she didn’t push herself. After all, the sheriff couldn’t chase us downstream. We were in his boat.

  Around another bend and a flock of turtles sunning on stumps, Grandma pulled for the remains of an old dock. We tied up there, and now we were out of the boat, climbing a bluff. Grandma led,
dragging the net of catfish. I was in the rear, doing my best with the picnic hamper. Mary Alice was between us, watching where she walked. She was scareder of snakes than she let on, if you ask me.

  An old house without a speck of paint on it stood tall on the bluff. Its outbuildings had caved in, and the privy stood at an angle. There were still prairie chickens around in those days, and they were pecking dirt. Otherwise, the place looked lifeless. Rags hung at the windows.

  The porch overlooking the creek had fallen off. Grandma tramped around to the far side of the house. She dropped her fish on the ground and waved us inside. Even in full daylight the place looked haunted. I didn’t want to go in, but Mary Alice was marching through the door already. So I had to. “Is anybody inside?” I whispered to Grandma as I lugged the hamper past her.

  “Nobody but Aunt Puss Chapman,” she said, like anybody would know that.

  It had been a fine house once. A wide black walnut staircase rose to a landing window with most of its stained glass still in. But it was creepy in here, dim and dusty. Smelled funny too. We went into a room piled up with furniture. Then one of the chairs spoke.

  “Where you been, girl?”

  Mary Alice flinched, but the old woman lost in the chair was staring straight at Grandma. And calling her girl?

  She was by many years the oldest person we’d ever seen up till then. Bald as an egg, but she needed a shave. And not a tooth in her head.

  “Who’s them chilrun with you?” she demanded of Grandma.

  “Just kids I found along the crick bank,” Grandma said, to our surprise. “They was fishing.”

  “I don’t know as I want them in the house.” Aunt Puss Chapman sent us a mean look. “Do they steal?”

  “Nothin’ you’ve got,” Grandma said, under her breath.

  “Talk up, girl,” Aunt Puss said. “You mumble. I’ve spoken to you about that before.” She pulled her shawl closer, though it was the hottest day of the year. “I’m hongry. You hightailed it out of here after breakfast, and I ain’t seen hide nor hoof mark of you since.”