A Long Way From Chicago

by Richard Peck

  “She ain’t seen me for a week,” Grandma mumbled to us. “But she forgets.”

  Then she called out to Aunt Puss: “Catfish and fried potatoes and onions, vinegar slaw, and a pickled peach apiece. And more of the same for your supper.”

  “I suppose it beats starving,” Aunt Puss snapped. “But hop to it, girl. Stir yer stumps.”

  I thought I might faint again. Nobody could talk to Grandma like that and live.

  She led us back to an old-time kitchen. It was in bad shape, but well stocked: big sacks of potatoes and onions, cornmeal, things in cans. And we’d brought a full hamper to add to Aunt Puss’s larder.

  I had to fire up the stove with a bunch of kindling while Grandma and Mary Alice went to work on the potatoes and onions. Mary Alice was in as big a daze as I was. “Grandma, is that nasty old lady your aunt?”

  I stopped to listen. If she was, that made her our great-great-aunt.

  “Naw, I was hired girl to her before I was married,” Grandma said. “Lived in this house and fetched and carried for her and slept in the attic.”

  “You had a room in the attic?”

  “Naw, I just slept up there. Had a bed tick with straw in it and changed it every spring. I haven’t always lived in the luxury you see me in now.”

  “What did she pay you, Grandma?”

  “Pay? She didn’t pay me a plug nickel. But she fed me.”

  I thought about that.

  “And now you feed her,” I said, but Grandma didn’t reply.

  We cleaned the fish on a plank table outdoors. I didn’t care much for it. It made me kind of sick to hear Grandma rip the skin off the catfish. She had her own quick way of doing that. But every time, it sounded like the fish screamed. She put me in charge of chopping off their heads, but I didn’t like chopping off the head of anything looking back at me. And catfish have mustaches for some reason, which is just plain weird. Finally, Mary Alice took the rusty hatchet out of my hand. And whomp, she’d bring down the blade, and that fish head would go flying. Mary Alice was good at it, so I let her do it. Grandma gutted.

  It was afternoon before we sat down at the dining-room table under a cobwebby gasolier. Aunt Puss was already at her place, so she was spryer than she looked. Grandma settled at the foot of the table. Without her hat, her white hair hung in damp tendrils. We’d been working like a whole pack of bird dogs.

  Watching Aunt Puss gum catfish was not a pretty sight. “These fish taste muddy,” she observed. “You’uns catch ’em?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” Mary Alice said.

  “What did you use for bait?” Aunt Puss said, looking at both of us.

  “Cheese,” I said.

  “Worms,” Mary Alice said, more wisely.

  Since we couldn’t get together on our story, Aunt Puss changed the subject. “You chilrun still in school?”

  We nodded.

  “Do they whup you?”

  “Do they what?” Mary Alice said.

  “Do they paddle yer behind when you need it?” Aunt Puss looked interested.

  “If they did, I’d quit school,” said Mary Alice, who’d just completed third grade.

  “They whupped that girl raw.” Aunt Puss pointed her fork down the table at Grandma.

  I had a sudden thought. Aunt Puss thought Grandma and Mary Alice and I were all about the same age. She hadn’t noticed the years passing. That’s why Grandma didn’t say we were her grandkids. It would just have mixed up Aunt Puss.

  “That’s when she come to work for me. They’d throwed her out of school.” Aunt Puss peered down the table. “Tell ’em why.”

  We looked at Grandma, naturally interested to know why she’d been throwed—thrown out of school. Grandma waved us away. “I forget,” she said.

  “I don’t!” Aunt Puss waved a fork. “It was because you wadded up your underdrawers to stop up the flue on the stove and smoke out the schoolhouse. That was the end of yer education!”

  “Working for you was an education,” Grandma muttered, though only Mary Alice and I heard.

  It took us another hour to clean up the kitchen the way Grandma wanted to leave it. When it was time for us to go, Aunt Puss was back in her chair in the parlor.

  “Where do you think you’re off to now?” she called out as we trooped through the front hall.

  “Down to the sty to slop the hogs,” Grandma called back.

  “Well, don’t dawdle. You dawdle, and I’ve spoken to you about that before. Get on out of here,” Aunt Puss hollered. “Let the door hit you where the dog bit you.”

  Outdoors I said, “Does she have hogs?”

  “She used to,” Grandma said. “She was right well-off at one time. She’s poor now, but she don’t know it.”

  How could she? She still had her hired girl and plenty to eat.

  “You take her food every week, don’t you, Grandma?”

  “Generally a good big roast chicken. She can gum that for days.” Grandma turned down the lane. “It keeps her out of the poor farm, and it gives me a quiet day in the country. That’s a fair swap.” Then her jaw clenched in its way. “But it’s just private business between her and me. And I don’t tell my private business.”

  We walked country roads all the way home. Grandma set a brisk pace, and I struggled along behind with a hamper heavy with cleaned catfish. Mary Alice went in the middle, watching where she walked.

  By the time we got home, the trees in Grandma’s yard were throwing long shadows, and it was evening in her kitchen. Mary Alice and I were both staggering. I was ready to go straight up to bed.

  But Grandma said, “Skin down to the cellar and bring up fifteen or twenty bottles of my beer. Just carry two at a time. I don’t want any broke.”

  I whimpered.

  But she was turning on Mary Alice. “And you and me’s going to fry up a couple pecks of potatoes to go with the fish. There won’t be nothing to it. I peeled the potatoes this morning before you two was up.”

  We stared.

  The catfish fried in long pans with the potatoes and onions at the other end, popping in the grease. The kitchen was blue with smoke, and night was at the windows before we finished up. “Now get down every platter I own,” she told me. Then she sent me for the card table I’d used for my jigsaw puzzle of Charles A. Lindbergh.

  Following her lead, we carried everything out into the night, making many trips. We lugged it all across the road and up to the Wabash Railroad right-of-way and planted the card table in the gravel.

  Finally, the platters of fish and potatoes overlapped on the table, and the opened beer bottles stood in a row beside the tracks.

  As the drifters came along, being hounded out of town, Grandma gave them a good feed and a beer to wet their whistles. Mary Alice helped, in an apron of Grandma’s that dragged the ground. They were hollow-eyed men who couldn’t believe their luck. Two or three of them, then five or six. Then a bunch, standing around the table, eating with both hands, sharing out the beer. They didn’t say much. They didn’t thank her. She wasn’t looking for thanks.

  She’d taken off her overalls and put the same wash dress back on, but she’d tied a fresh apron over it. Her hair was a mess, fanning out from the bun at the back, white in the moonlight. She watched them feed, working her mouth.

  Then we saw the swinging lanterns, the sheriff and his deputies coming along behind to keep the drifters moving.

  Up trooped O. B. Dickerson, dressed now with his badge on and his belt full of bullets riding low under his belly. His deputies loomed behind him, but they weren’t singing “Sweet Adeline.”

  “Okay, okay, break it up,” he said, elbowing through the drifters. Then he came to Grandma.

  “Dagnab it, Mrs. Dowdel, you’re everywhere I turn. You’re all over me like white on rice. Now what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m giving these boys the first eats they’ve had today.”

  “Or yesterday,” a drifter said.

  “Mrs. Do
wdel, let me ’splain something to you,” the sheriff bawled. “We don’t want to feed these loafers. We want ’em out of town.”

  “They’re out of town.” Grandma pointed her spatula at the sheriff’s feet. “The town stops there. We’re in the county.”

  “Yes, and I’m the sheriff of the county!” O. B. Dickerson bellowed. “You’re in my jurisdiction!”

  “Do tell,” Grandma said. “Run me in.”

  The minute she said that, all the drifters looked up. That was when Sheriff Dickerson’s deputies saw they were outnumbered.

  “Mrs. Dowdel,” the sheriff boomed, “I wouldn’t know what to charge you with first. You’re a one-woman crime wave. Where’d you get them fish, for instance?” he said, wisely overlooking the home brews in the drifters’ hands.

  “Out of a trap in Salt Crick,” Grandma remarked. “Same as you get yours.”

  O. B. Dickerson’s eyes bulged. “You accusing me, the sheriff of Piatt County, of running fish traps?” He poked his own chest with a pudgy finger.

  “Not this morning,” Grandma replied. “You was too drunk.”

  The drifters chuckled.

  “And talkin’ about this morning,” the sheriff said, his face shading purple even in the darkness, “you stole my boat. That’s what we call larceny, Mrs. Dowdel. You could go up for that.”

  “Oh well, the boat.” Grandma made a little gesture with the spatula. “You’ll find it tied up at Aunt Puss Chapman’s dock. As a rule, I take it back where you tie it up. But of course I couldn’t do that this morning. How could I row these grandkids of mine back past the Rod and Gun Club? They’d already seen what no child should—the sheriff and his deputies, blind drunk and naked as jaybirds, dancin’ jigs on the porch and I don’t know what all. It’s like to have marked this girl for life.”

  Grandma nudged Mary Alice, who stood there in the big apron looking drooped and damaged.

  “I’m thinkin’ about taking her to the doctor so she can talk it out. I don’t want her to develop one of them complexes you hear about.”

  “Whoa,” the deputies murmured behind Sheriff Dickerson.

  Earl T. Askew stepped up and said into his ear, “O.B., let’s just let sleeping dogs lay. I got my hands full with Mrs. Askew as it is.”

  The sheriff simmered, but said, “Okay, Earl, if you say so.” The sheriff and his posse were in retreat now. But he had to cover himself. “Mrs. Dowdel,” he said, pulling a long face, “they’s things I can overlook. But it seems to me you’re runnin’ a soup kitchen without a license from the Board of Health. I have an idea there’s a law against that on the books.”

  “Go look it up, O.B.,” Grandma said. “See if there’s a law against feeding the hungry. But I have to tell you, you’ve talked so long, the evidence is all ate up.”

  And of course it was. The drifters had wolfed down the last morsel. With a small finger, Mary Alice pointed out the bare platters. Only a faint scent of fried catfish lingered on the night air. The empty beer bottles went without saying.

  The drifters were moving off down the track, and the deputies were heading back into town. O. B. Dickerson spit in the gravel, swung around, and followed them, his big boots grinding gravel.

  We stacked the platters and rounded up the beer bottles for Grandma’s next batch. I collapsed the legs on the card table. There wasn’t a lot of music in Grandma, but she was humming as we worked, and I thought I recognized the tune:

  The night that Paddy Murphy died

  I never shall forget. . . .

  Then after our quiet day in the country, we carried everything back across the road, under a silver-dollar moon.

  The Day of Judgment

  1932

  “I don’t think Grandma’s a very good influence on us,” Mary Alice said. It had taken her a while to come to that conclusion, and I had to agree. It reconciled us some to our trips to visit her. Mary Alice was ten now. I believe this was the first year she didn’t bring her jump rope with her. And she no longer pitched a fit because she couldn’t take her best friends, Beverly and Audrey, to meet Grandma. “They wouldn’t understand,” Mary Alice said.

  We weren’t so sure Mother and Dad would either. Since we still dragged our heels about going, they didn’t notice we looked forward to the trip.

  The gooseberries were ripe when we got there that August. And come to find out, Grandma was famous for her gooseberry pies. Mary Alice and I were stemming berries at the kitchen table that first morning. Grandma was supervising a pan of them on the stove. The gooseberries popped softly as they burst open in boiling water.

  Then somebody knocked on the front door. Grandma ran an arm across her forehead and started through the house. We’d have followed, but she said, “Keep at it.”

  When she came back, Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, was right behind her. If she’d thought she was going to be asked to sit down, she had another think coming. Grandma returned to the stove, leaving Mrs. Weidenbach beached by the kitchen table, where she overlooked Mary Alice and me.

  She was big on top, though nowhere near as big as Grandma. But she had tiny feet, teetering in high-heeled shoes. The heat of the kitchen staggered her, but then people from Death Valley would have keeled over in Grandma’s kitchen.

  “Mrs. Dowdel, I am here on a mission,” she said, “and I’ll come right to the point.”

  “Do that,” Grandma said.

  “As you know, this is county fair week,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, “the annual opportunity for our small community to make its mark.”

  Grandma said nothing.

  “As you recall,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, “my bread-and-butter pickles have taken the blue ribbon every year since the fair recommenced after the Great War.”

  If Grandma recalled this, she showed no sign.

  “But my cucumbers this year haven’t been up to snuff, not worth the brine for pickling. How were yours?”

  “Didn’t put any in,” Grandma said.

  “Ah well, you were wise.” Mrs. Weidenbach’s forehead began to look slick. It wasn’t just the heat. “Mrs. Dowdel, I’ll come clean. I don’t think I better enter my bread-and-butter pickles this year, and I’m going to tell you why. The depression is upon us. Times are hard.”

  “They was never easy for me,” Grandma recalled.

  “And quite unfairly,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, “people blame the bankers.”

  “My stars,” Grandma said. “The bank forecloses on people’s farms and throws them off their land, and they don’t even appreciate it.”

  “Now, Mrs. Dowdel, don’t be like that.” Mrs. Weidenbach reached down the front of her dress and plucked up a lace handkerchief. She dabbed all around her mouth. “Mr. Weidenbach has asked me not to enter my bread-and-butter pickles into competition at the fair this year.”

  “Keep your head down till the depression blows over?”

  “Something like that,” Mrs. Weidenbach murmured. “So I naturally thought of you. After all, we’ve been neighbors these many years.”

  The Weidenbachs lived at the far end of town in the only brick house.

  “I said to my husband, Mr. Weidenbach, somebody must carry home a blue ribbon to keep our town’s name in front of the public. Otherwise, those county seat women will sweep the field. As you know, Mrs. Cowgill’s decorative butter pats never do better than Honorable Mention.”

  If Grandma knew who won what at the county fair, she showed no sign.

  “But there is nobody to touch you for baking with gooseberries. Even those of us who’ve never had a taste have heard. Word gets around.”

  “Try as a person will to keep it quiet,” Grandma said.

  “Gooseberries are tricky things,” Mrs. Weidenbach went on. “Now, you take Mrs. Vottsmeier over at Bement. She wouldn’t take on a gooseberry, but she’ll pull down a blue ribbon in the Fruit Pies and Cobblers division with her individual cherry tarts if somebody doesn’t put a stop to her.”

  Quiet followed as we listened to Grandma’s
wooden spoon scraping the sides of the stew pan. At length, she said, “I cook to eat, not to show off.”

  Mrs. Weidenbach sighed. “Mrs. Dowdel, these are desperate times. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. It is up to you to hold high the banner for our town.”

  Grandma putting herself out for the fame of the town? I thought Mrs. Weidenbach was on the wrong track. On the other hand, Grandma liked to win.

  Growing frantic, Mrs. Weidenbach let her gaze skim over Mary Alice and me. “And a day at the fair would be a nice outing for your grandkiddies.”

  “Wouldn’t cut any ice with them,” Grandma said. “They’re from Chicago, so they’ve seen everything.”

  Instantly, an expression of great boredom fell over Mary Alice’s face. I thought she might yawn. She was playing along with Grandma. I’d been thinking a day at the fair would be a welcome change, but I just shrugged and went on stemming gooseberries.

  Grandma turned slightly from the stove. “Wouldn’t have any way to get there if I wanted to go.”

  Mrs. Weidenbach brightened. “I will personally conduct you to the fair on prize day in my Hupmobile.” She waved a hand in benediction over us. “And there’ll be plenty of room for your grandkiddies.”

  “Oh well,” Grandma said, “if I have an extra pie and it’s not raining that day . . .”

  “Mrs. Dowdel, I knew you would stand and deliver!” Mrs. Weidenbach clasped her hands. “And remember, even the red ribbon for second prize will be better than nothing.”

  Grandma gazed past her, seeming to count the corpses on the flypaper strip. Mrs. Weidenbach was dismissed and soon left. We all listened to the powerful roar as she ground her Hupmobile into gear.

  Grandma’s sleeves were already turned back, or she’d be turning them back now. She pointed at me. “Scoot uptown and bring me a twenty-five-pound sack of sugar. Tell them to stick it on my bill. After that I want every gooseberry off them bushes out back.” She turned on Mary Alice. “And you’re going to learn a thing or two about pie crust.”