A Long Way From Chicago

by Richard Peck

I wanted to ask him if he’d driven it. But that was too close to asking him for a ride and a lesson. We both knew I didn’t have two dollars.

  “Hudson’s sending out their new Terraplane models to drum up interest. It’s the make Dillinger drove to outrun the cops. But, hey, you’d know that,” Ray said. “You probably took a gander at the body the Chicago cops put on display. You reckon it was really Dillinger?”

  I shrugged. I could see this was the summer when I missed out on everything.

  That night after supper Grandma said, “I suppose you kids want to go to the picture show,” meaning she wanted to go to the picture show. We were willing, though going to the pictures for us was the Oriental Theater in Chicago, featuring a first-run movie, a pipe organ, and a stage show with a dog act.

  It was different at Grandma’s. On Wednesday nights the Lions Club sponsored the picture show in the park. They put up canvas walls, so it was like a tent without a roof. You sat on benches, and they showed the movie on a sheet hung from the branch of a tree. Everybody but Baptists came. Admission was a nickel a head or a can of food for the hungry. Grandma took a quart Mason jar of her beets, and we three got in on that.

  Since nobody liked sitting behind Grandma, we settled on the back row. There was some socializing she didn’t take part in. Then the projectionist got the film threaded, and the show started. Mary Alice had been hoping for a Shirley Temple, but it was a Dracula, not too old, starring Bela Lugosi.

  I have to say, it got to me. All those living dead people with black lips. When Dracula turned into a bat at the window, the night behind him merged with the night around us. It was a good audience for a horror picture. Several people screamed, and once a whole bench turned over. A night breeze sighed in the tree, making the screen waver. Mary Alice kept her eyes shut through most of it. Grandma barely blinked.

  Afterward, we walked home in the dark. Mary Alice stuck close to Grandma, and I wasn’t far off myself. The town was just one shadow after another. When a big lilac bush threw leaf patterns on the walk ahead of us, Grandma shied like a horse. Then we came to an old oak tree growing close to the road. Grandma pulled back and edged around it like Count Dracula was standing on the other side, in a cape.

  Two or three years earlier we’d have thought the movie had spooked Grandma. Now we wondered if she was trying to spook us.

  When we were safely inside at home, she made a business of latching the screen door. Then she looked meaningfully at the window over by the sink, like Dracula’s electric eyes might be staring in, out of his terrible fanged face. Mary Alice and I were frozen to the linoleum in spite of ourselves.

  “Grandma, there aren’t such things as vampires, are there?” Mary Alice asked. Did she want to know, or was she testing Grandma? Every summer Mary Alice seemed to pick up another of Grandma’s traits.

  “Vampires? No. The only bloodsuckers is the banks.” Grandma stroked her chins. “Movies is all pretend. They’re made in California, you know. But they prove a point. Make something seem real, and people will believe it. The public will swallow anything.”

  That seemed her last word for the night. Now Mary Alice and I had to stumble up that long staircase to the darkness above. Being the man of the family, I ought to have gone first, but didn’t.

  “Sweet dreams,” Grandma said behind us.

  It was a long night, and hot. Mary Alice shut her window to keep vampire bats out. I know because I heard her closing hers when I was closing mine.

  The next morning, after that restless night, I said to Grandma at the breakfast table, “I need two bucks bad.”

  “Who don’t?” Grandma said. “What for?”

  “Driving lessons, and Ray Veech wants two dollars to teach me.”

  “What do you want to learn to drive for anyway?” she said. “Don’t you go around Chicago in taxicabs and trolleys?”

  I couldn’t explain it to Grandma. I was getting too old to be a boy, and driving meant you were a man. Something like that. I shrugged, and she slid a belly-busting breakfast in front of me.

  Mary Alice turned up, looking like the ghost of herself. She was pale-faced with bags under her eyes. Though glad to see daylight, she was worn to a frazzle.

  “Anyhow,” Grandma said, “you don’t have time for driving lessons. I want you two to poke around in the attic. I can’t get up there anymore. You have to climb up through a trapdoor in the closet.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Any old rummage for the church sale.”

  So Grandma, who didn’t take part in community activities, wanted to go to the rummage sale. She ate with the fork in one hand, the knife in the other. Then she looked up like she was having one of her sudden thoughts.

  “Tell you what. Find that old stovepipe hat up there. It belonged to a preacher who knew my maw and paw. He was visiting one time, trying to convert them, and he dropped dead on the parlor rug. They kept his stovepipe hat on their hat rack ever after, to remember him by. I stuck it up there. Get it down. I saw a picture in the paper of John D. Rockefeller in a hat like that. They may be coming back in style.”

  I doubted that last part. But Mary Alice and I dragged a ladder upstairs. Grandma followed as far as the second floor to show us where the trapdoor was. We were disappearing up into the attic when below us she said, “Watch yourselves. I might have bats in my belfry.”

  We weren’t familiar with attics, but this one wasn’t too crowded. Grandma used up more than she saved. There were some three-legged chairs and a dress dummy half her size and some coal-oil lamps from olden times. Mary Alice dodged cobwebs and tried not to brush against anything. “I hate it up here,” she said. But then we started going through a couple of old steamer trunks.

  I pulled a big furry buffalo robe out of mine. “What about this?”

  Mary Alice shrank. “Don’t touch it. It’s awful. It’s got living things in it.”

  She was right. Things with wings. I put it aside. Then I came to some baby clothes, maybe Dad’s, nothing too likely even for a rummage sale.

  Mary Alice’s trunk was full of paper: yellowed Farm Journals and buttons on cardboard and a ton of dress patterns. Then she gasped.

  In her hand was an ancient valentine, a big heart surrounded by paper lace. The motto on it read:

  WHEN CUPID SENDS HIS ARROW HOME,

  I HOPE IT MRS. YOU.

  It was signed with a question mark.

  “But, Joey, who was it sent to?” Mary Alice wondered.

  “Grandma, I guess.”

  “She got valentines?” Mary Alice and I stared at each other.

  Then she found another one, also ancient, but without the lace:

  WHEN YOU’RE OLD AND THINK YOU’RE SWEET,

  TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND SMELL YOUR FEET.

  “That sounds more like it,” Mary Alice said.

  A voice of doom echoed up from the trapdoor. “You find that stovepipe hat yet?”

  I jumped and so did Mary Alice. The lid on her trunk dropped down on her head.

  Grandma was standing right under the trapdoor, listening to us and waiting for the stovepipe hat.

  “I really, really hate this attic,” Mary Alice said, whispering.

  The hat was in my trunk. I handed it down to Grandma.

  “It’s getting too hot up here,” Mary Alice said. “And all these dress patterns are from before the war.” But out of the bottom of her trunk she pulled up an old quilt. It was so worn, you could see through it. Its pattern was fancy, but faded.

  “How about this?” she said to me. She was looking around the hem to see if the quilt maker had stitched in her initials, but the edges were all fraying away.

  “What is it?” said the trapdoor.

  “An old quilt,” we both yelled down.

  “I forgot about that,” Grandma hollered back. “My aunt Josie Smull pieced that quilt. Drop it down.”

  I did, and Grandma said, “Keep at it.” We listened to her trudge away.

  O
ther trunks were tucked away under the eaves, so it took us all morning to go through everything. But we didn’t find anything else any sane person would want in a thousand years.

  That afternoon we walked uptown and a block beyond to the United Brethren Church. We weren’t going for the lunch the Ladies’ Circle was selling. We ate at home, but Grandma said they’d be offering free lemonade. She’d taken off her apron and wore a hat. Not her fine, fair-going hat. This was the one she gardened and fished in, nibbled at the brim. She’d stuck a fresh peony at the front of the crown to dress it up. She strolled along over the occasional sidewalks with the preacher’s stovepipe hat in a grocery bag. Mary Alice wore her straw hat and a dress because we were going to church, more or less. I brought up the rear with Aunt Josie Smull’s quilt folded over my sweating arm.

  “What’s a church rummage sale like anyway?” Mary Alice asked.

  “Ever been in a henhouse?” Grandma said.

  The sale was in the church basement. The air was battered by funeral parlor fans, and ladies were picking over long tables. Some were still bringing in their treasures and trash. Others were snatching things up and taking them to the cashier’s card table to pay for them. A sharp scent of potato salad hung in the air, but the Ladies’ Circle had cleared away lunch. Now they were bringing out pitchers of free lemonade.

  Everybody looked up when Grandma loomed into the room, as people always did. Several pulled back, but a tall, strict-looking lady came forth. “Why, goodness, it’s Mrs. Dowdel,” she said.

  Grandma made short work of her by handing over the grocery bag and nodding at the quilt, which I offered up.

  Mary Alice went for a look at the merchandise. But the tables were surrounded by flying elbows, so I settled next to Grandma. She was on a folding chair, pouring herself a glass of lemonade. She had a way of sitting with her feet apart and her hands on her knees. After a good long swig of lemonade, she observed the scene. In fact, she was biding her time. Somehow I knew this.

  A flurry began at the other end of a table. From their hats, they were all town ladies, not country. A hiss of whispers whipped up into raised voices. Grandma sat on, at her ease.

  Then the strict lady in charge, who was Mrs. Earl T. Askew, came through the crowds, heading for us. Mrs. Askew’s face had gone vampire white.

  Bending to Grandma, she spoke in low, urgent tones. “Mrs. Dowdel, I feel I must tell you that Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, has offered fifteen dollars for that stovepipe hat.”

  She stared at Grandma for a reaction and got nothing back.

  “Mrs. Dowdel, are you one-hundred-percent sure you want to part with that hat?”

  “It don’t belong to me.” Grandma made a small gesture. “I have an idea it was in with some other old stuff Effie Wilcox threw away when the bank run her out of town.”

  Mrs. Askew’s gaze was electric. “Other old stuff?” She seemed to have trouble breathing.

  Grandma nodded. “Just old clutter Effie had found in the house back when she moved in.”

  Mrs. Askew pivoted like a dancer and was gone. Already Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach was over at the cashier, peeling off five-dollar bills as fast as she could dig them out of her pocketbook.

  Oh, Grandma, I thought, what have you done?

  Mrs. Askew plunged back. Aunt Josie Smull’s quilt was clutched in her arms like a long-lost child. “Mrs. Dowdel,” she said, “oh, Mrs. Dowdel, are you one-hundred-percent—”

  Grandma took the quilt onto her lap, smoothed it out, and looked it over. A crowd gathered. There in the corner, worked in faded thread, initials had magically appeared on the fraying hem:

  M·T·L·

  Suddenly, Mrs. Weidenbach appeared, gripping the preacher’s stovepipe hat. She went right for Mrs. Askew. “What have you got there? Let me—”

  “Not so fast, Wilhelmina,” Mrs. Askew snapped. “I seen—saw it first.” She swept up the quilt that Grandma gladly surrendered.

  “What are those initials?” Mrs. Weidenbach was beside herself. “Oh my stars and garters! M.T.L. Mary Todd Lincoln! And I’ve got Abe Lincoln’s own stovepipe hat. His name’s lettered in on the sweatband!”

  Two things happened that next morning. A car from out of town backfired in the vicinity of the bank, and everybody on the sidewalk dropped down and grabbed gravel. Who knew but what John Dillinger was alive and well and up to his old tricks?

  The other thing was a knock at Grandma’s front door right after breakfast. Mary Alice and I followed when she went to answer it, opening to a stringy young guy in a seersucker suit.

  “Well, Otis,” she said, “what?”

  “Ma’am,” he said, “Mr. Weidenbach would be pleased if you could spare him a moment of your time at your earliest convenience.”

  Grandma stepped back and clutched her throat, showing shock. “Don’t tell me the bank’s failed. Banks is failing all over. Had I better draw out my funds? Is there time?”

  “No, ma’am, the bank’s still in business.” Otis looked down at his boots. “Your seventeen dollars is safe.”

  “You give me a turn!” she said, slapping at her bosom and shutting the door in his face.

  She waited an hour and a half. Then she put on her gardening hat and went uptown to the bank. Mary Alice and I went with her. When we got to the business block, people were still just getting up off the sidewalk. The bank was store-sized, and the only teller was Otis, back in his cage. He waved us through to the rear office, beside the safe.

  I’d never seen Mr. Weidenbach before, but this couldn’t have been one of his better days. Over his head on the wall above the desk was a widemouthed bass, stuffed. “You will have to excuse me,” he boomed, showing us chairs. “This crackbrained rumor that Dillinger is still alive is doing our business no good.”

  “If it’s a rumor at all,” said Grandma, on her dignity and then some. “A rumor is sometimes truth on the trail.”

  “I am interested to hear you say so, Mrs. Dowdel.” The banker pulled the purse strings of his mouth taut. “It brings us to the point.”

  “Get right to it,” Grandma said.

  “Certain items supposedly from the estate of President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln have surfaced in a house the bank is forced to foreclose on. Do you grasp what this could mean, Mrs. Dowdel?”

  Grandma thought she did. “I expect the state will take that land and restore the house as a museum. I hear a rumor Lincoln debated Douglas in that very parlor. Rumor has it he split the rails for the fence that used to enclose the brickyard.”

  “And who’s been circulating such cockeyed rumors?” The banker turned a deeper color.

  “Who knows where a rumor starts?” Grandma mused. “Who knows where it’ll end? They’ve very likely heard it at the statehouse in Springfield by now. I have an idea they’ll send over a historian any day now to snoop.”

  “Mrs. Dowdel, the bank has signed papers with Deere and Company to build an implement shed across that entire property and the site of the old brickyard too. Any delay throws a monkey wrench in the deal. Better times are on the way, and what’s good for a bank is good for the community.”

  “But a nice state park wouldn’t be bad either,” Grandma pondered. “We could all set out on summer evenings, recalling Honest Abe. That park we got now is just wasteland the Wabash Railroad didn’t want.”

  Mr. Weidenbach’s gaping mouth hung near his blotter now. He had his desktop in a death grip. “Mrs. Dowdel, you falsified those so-called Lincoln items. They’re bogus. I could have the law on you.”

  “That’s right.” Grandma gazed above him at the widemouthed bass. “The banker throws the poor old widder in the pokey. That’ll look real good for your business.”

  Mr. Weidenbach was smaller now, deflated. “Mrs. Dowdel,” he said in a voice strangled with emotion, “help me out of this. I’m in too deep with John Deere. I got to go forward because I can’t do otherwise.”

  “Lop off your back end,” Grandma said.

  “I beg y
our pardon?”

  “Build a shorter implement shed over the old brickyard, and leave Effie Wilcox’s house be.”

  A glimmer of hope showed in the banker’s hard eye.

  “I suppose we could go back to the drawing board and reallocate our square footage.”

  “Do that,” Grandma said. “And one more thing. You give Effie Wilcox back her house, free and clear. It isn’t worth nothing anyway—apart from its historical value.”

  “Mrs. Dowdel, that’s not business,” the banker said. “That’s blackmail.”

  “What’s the difference?” Grandma said.

  A silence was observed. Then banker Weidenbach turned up his hands. “All right. It’s Mrs. Wilcox’s house, free and clear. But you’ll have to confess you falsified those so-called Lincoln items. Fair’s fair.”

  “Oh well.” Grandma sketched a casual pattern in the air with one hand. “We can get that rumor going right now. Effie didn’t mean to put Lincoln’s name in the stovepipe hat. I—she just lettered in ‘A Lincoln’ to mean it was the kind of hat he wore.”

  Mary Alice and I exchanged a look across Grandma.

  “And that M.T.L. on the quilt. Pshaw!” Grandma said. “Effie Wilcox had a cousin, name of Maude Teeter Lingenbloom. That’s M.T.L. for you.”

  Mr. Weidenbach replied in an exhausted voice, “I’ll get the word out.”

  Grandma was on her feet now. She patted the bun of her back hair under the nibbled brim. “Free and clear, you got that?” she said to Mr. Weidenbach. “Effie don’t make no more payments on that house.” Then as if a sudden thought struck her, she nudged me. “And you can give this boy here a two-dollar bill.” She nudged Mary Alice. “And fair’s fair. Give this girl two dollars too.”

  “That’s big money for young’uns,” the banker said. “Shall I draw it out of your account, Mrs. Dowdel?”

  “No, you double-dealing, four-flushing old cootie,” she replied. “You can draw it out of your own wallet. Any man with a wife who’ll pay fifteen dollars for an old preacher’s moth-eaten stovepipe hat has four bucks to spare.”

  Silent wars seemed to wage in Mr. Weidenbach’s brain. Then he pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket. He kept a bootlace tied around it. We watched as he drew out a pair of two-dollar bills and handed them to Mary Alice and me. And heaven help us, we took them.