Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  With a growl, it sprang at him.

  “Yowww,” screamed Eddie, leaping back and flipping the tablecloth over the animal. The remnants of the picnic scattered in the air, but the coon got caught in the cloth. The more it struggled to get free, the more tangled it got.

  “Should I spear it?” asked White Sox.

  “Don’t,” said the other fisherman. “The blood’s poison.”

  Eddie turned to Bunny and me. “Get back,” he said. “Go to the river.”

  Bunny pulled me away. The raccoon was still thrashing around under the tablecloth, making growling noises, like the sounds of a car engine trying to turn over on a cold morning. Its claws kept ripping through the cloth and then getting tied up. The men circled around. Eddie still held the Coke bottle and the fishermen waved their spears. White Sox kept setting up and taking aim, but then dropping his weapon, as if he couldn’t get off a clear shot.

  “What’ll we do?” said flattop finally.

  Eddie stopped circling. “You got a gun in your truck?”

  “No. Back in town.”

  “A rock,” said Eddie. “Find a rock.”

  The men searched the ground. Bunny and I looked along the river edge. “There aren’t any rocks in swamps,” said flattop after a minute.

  “How about a log?” yelled Bunny. She pointed to a branch about four inches thick that had drifted down the Little Carp and was lodged in the bank on the other side. Eddie ran over. Without pausing, he leaped off the bank into the middle of the river. He came down in a mud hole and sank up to his shoulders. “Jesus!” he cried.

  “Don’t drown,” shouted Bunny, flapping her arms to show him how to swim.

  Eddie hauled himself out of the mud and pushed through the water to the other bank. He pulled out the branch and then came back, flopping on his belly and dog paddling over the mud hole. Wheezing and coughing, he pulled himself out of the water and ran back to the spot where the fishermen were still circling the coon.

  “You gonna club it?” asked White Sox.

  Eddie stared down at the balled-up tablecloth. Little tufts of brown fur were visible through rips in the material and a thin, bony leg poked out underneath. The coon was almost still now, the only movement was an occasional twitch. “Looks like it’s dyin’ on its own,” said Eddie. The three men cautiously leaned down. “Maybe it’s already dead,” he added.

  “You better kill it,” said flattop.

  Eddie stared some more. The log dangled at his side. “I guess you’re right,” he said. He spread his elbows to make room. The other men stood aside. With both hands, Eddie raised the log up over his head, as if he were chopping wood. The animal wasn’t moving at all now. The checkered cloth fluttered gently and was still. At the top of his swing, Eddie stopped. I can’t say why, but I knew he was going to. In that instant, I felt that my arms, too, were locked above my head, my fingers were gripping a wet and heavy club that now seemed somehow mean. White Sox shot a hard glance at Eddie, and finally Eddie brought the log down with a soft thud. Bunny grabbed my arm and covered her eyes. Eddie struck three more times, going easier with each blow.

  “Now it’s dead,” said White Sox.

  Eddie looked down at what he’d done and then heaved the log, end over end, far out into the swamp.

  “I’m glad I didn’t bring Grandmother’s good tablecloth,” Bunny whispered to me.

  For the ride home, Bunny made Eddie strip down to his underwear and sit in the backseat, so he wouldn’t get the Pontiac full of mud. “There’ll be hell to pay if the cops catch us like this,” said Eddie, grinning.

  Bunny was worried about getting stopped for speeding, so we crawled back toward town. Coming in on Fogarty Road, a line of cars got stuck behind us because the road curves, and they couldn’t pass. Someone started to honk. Eddie laughed. “Go slower,” he said. “I’m enjoyin’ this.”

  Suddenly, a squad car was beside us. The cop gestured for Bunny to pull over to the side of the road. He parked behind us and walked slowly up to Bunny’s window. He was a big, barrel-chested man. I recognized him, but I didn’t know his name.

  “Somethin’ wrong with your car?” he asked.

  “No, officer,” said Bunny.

  “You know, there’s a minimum speed limit,” he said. “Twenty-five miles an hour.”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  He looked past Bunny to the back seat, where Eddie was sitting with his legs crossed. The policeman straightened up. He stepped over to the back door and flung it open so hard the hinge screamed. “Out,” he ordered.

  Eddie climbed out, grinning. He looked ridiculous in his underwear beside the cop.

  “His clothes got wet when I was attacked by a raccoon,” said Bunny.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the cop. He spun Eddie around. “Are you drunk, Boggs?” he said.

  “Not enough,” said Eddie.

  “This is Sunday, you know,” said the cop, without explanation.

  Eddie smirked. “There’s a dead raccoon with rabies out to Mason’s Farm,” he said. “You ought to go bury it.”

  “I don’t do work like that,” said the cop.

  An old, brown car passed by, and a passenger, seeing Eddie, hooted and waved.

  The cop leaned down and reached into the back seat of the Pontiac, pulling out a Hamms can. He jiggled it next to his ear, and you could hear the liquid slosh. “Open liquor,” he said.

  Eddie climbed back in and slammed the door. The cop took Bunny’s license and walked to his car to write a ticket. Bunny looked at Eddie in the rear-view mirror. “Thanks,” she said.

  Eddie grunted.

  When the cop came back, he gave Bunny her license and a copy of the ticket. He put his face in the window and looked at Eddie. “You got no pride,” he said.

  “Don’t need none in front of you,” said Eddie.

  “Thank you, officer,” said Bunny quickly. “We’ll go now.”

  The cop straightened up. As Bunny pulled back onto the road, he slapped the trunk of the car with his hand, making a loud, ringing smack.

  “Jesus!” said Bunny.

  She kept at exactly twenty-five miles an hour the rest of the way back. When we got to Rose Dry Cleaners, the parking lot was empty. Bunny pulled up beside the stairway leading to Eddie’s room. He climbed out and took his sopping clothes from the trunk. Then he stood in front of the car and did a little hula dance in his underwear, swinging his hips from side to side. “Get going,” said Bunny angrily. She gunned the car and spit gravel all over the building as she pulled away.

  We didn’t say much on the way back to the Vernons’. I was thinking about Eddie, and I was starting to see how hard it was going to be for Bunny to let him go.

  EIGHTEEN

  “How was your day with your mother?” Mrs. O’Brien asked the next morning. We were driving through a misty drizzle out to Ward’s, which was having a white sale.

  “Oh, fine,” I said. “It was fine.”

  “I think she’s starting to catch on,” Mrs. O’Brien said. “I had my doubts at first, but I think she’s starting to catch on.”

  In the half rain, the wipers on the station wagon scraped methodically against the windshield. We passed the fairgrounds, which was starting to come to life for Thursday’s opening. A few of the long, low 4-H tents were already up, and the silver skeleton of the Ferris wheel, not yet outfitted with seats, jutted into the gray air. Several men in dark, shiny slickers were marching over the soggy turf. They moved slowly, as if overwhelmed by all they had to do. The scene was gloomy and I turned away.

  Ward’s was gloomy, too, starting with the broad expanse of empty, wet parking lot, a field of lifeless gray. Mrs. O’Brien pulled up to the front, near a cluster of cars whose drivers had come early for the sale. “I’d have to go ten times around the square to find a space on a morning like this,” she said with satisfaction.

  Inside, she hurried away toward the linen department, while I wandered off on my own. I turned down a wide aisle that stret
ched back endlessly with new school supplies, all horribly yellow. How could school start without me? I wanted everything to stop until I was free again—until all my problems were only a memory. What had Reverend Vaughn said? There’s no giant wheel of life that rolls inevitably forward. Maybe not, but looking around Ward’s, with its aisle after aisle of racks and displays, its pots and pans, socks, refrigerators, pencils, toys, books, suits, chairs, paint, thumbtacks—it seemed there was just too much stuff around for the world to wait up for me.

  I found my way over to the Sweet Sixteen Shoppe, which was set off by a lacy white canopy draped from the ceiling. I hadn’t bought clothes from Ward’s in years. The store apparently assumed that girls only grew tall by getting fat, so anything the right length for me was flappingly wide and boxy. Still, I strolled among the racks of skirts and dresses, rustling the clothes with my hand. A flowery fragrance hung above everything; I imagined a blue-jacketed Ward’s lady blowing perfume into the air each morning, trying to give the clunky clothes the smell of something delicate.

  The store was pushing a circle skirt of clingy cotton, red with a pink print of small flowers. The design was rather nice, actually, compared to the general drabness, and a whole rack of the skirts was set out, stretching thirty feet or so. I fumbled my way among them, looking halfheartedly for a size ten, then gave up. In a month, the skirts would be all over the high school, bright spots of red in the halls, each one signifying a kind of flaw. I went off in search of Mrs. O’Brien.

  She was unhappy, too; the linen selection had been meager. “That’s why they have these sales,” she grumbled as we splashed back to the car. “To get rid of stock no one would notice otherwise.”

  Driving down Dunlop Street, back in town, Mrs. O’Brien braked suddenly in front of Kuhn’s Garage. A fresh wreck, a crumpled green pile of metal, had appeared overnight. The front end of the car had been crushed and pushed back, creating a flat, wrinkled face with a gaping, grillwork mouth.

  Several people were standing around under umbrellas, and Mrs. O’Brien pulled into the driveway. She rolled down her window. “Terrible!” she called out to the space around her. A tall man with a red, puffy face walked up. He reported that the car had hit one of the concrete abutments on the Route 59 overpass. A boy from Willowbrook had been driving, taking his girl for a joyride. Amazingly, the boy had hardly been scratched; the girl’s legs had been crushed. Mrs. O’Brien took in her breath sharply and said she supposed the girl was lucky to be alive at all. A woman named Florence, one of the checkers at Woolworth’s, walked over, bumping umbrellas with the puffy-faced man. “It’s so awful,” said Florence. “You can see her little white pocketbook in front, just squooshed in the metal.”

  The man went over to look. “I hear she’ll never walk again,” said Florence.

  Mrs. O’Brien shook her head. We stared at the green hunk of metal, shiny with rain. The puffy-faced man walked over to two other men, who were standing on the other side of the wreck. He said something to them, but they didn’t seem to pay attention, so he walked back over to Mrs. O’Brien’s car. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why these things happen alone. Those kids were out there on the road by themselves. It wasn’t raining yet and visibility was good. They just crash into whatever’s there. It’s like something pushes them off the road. It don’t make sense.”

  “These times,” said Mrs. O’Brien.

  The Exponent that afternoon said the girl’s name was Ellen Pigott, and both legs had been amputated above the knee. The front page had a photograph of the car crushed against the abutment. I studied the dark, grainy picture and tried to imagine what had happened. Had the boy who’d been driving been distracted suddenly? Maybe he’d been showing off or he’d tried to steal a kiss. In the instant, it had happened. One mistake. His was probably quicker and simpler even than mine. It didn’t seem right that things were so fragile, that in one unthinking moment you could destroy everything. What’s the use?

  I had the paper spread out on the kitchen table, and Mrs. Vernon looked over my shoulder. She made clicking noises with her tongue. “It’s like a war,” she said.

  Percy Granville was on the front page, too. Over the weekend, he’d given an interview to the Chicago Tribune, admitting he’d pilfered the money from the treasurer’s office and explaining how it all had happened. The Exponent’s account of the interview was long, and I read it from beginning to end. Granville claimed he was just a smalltime banker, a simple, country boy who had got into politics almost by accident. But politics was the great corrupter, he said—the dinners, the drinks, the speeches, the attention. He’d been seduced by it all, and soon he was spending lavishly on parties and trips and women. All his life, he’d been a frumpy little banker, and suddenly he was the state treasurer, a man with power and fame. He loved the excitement, but it was like a drug—he always had to have more. And the excitement was expensive. That’s why he’d started to steal. “I must have been temporarily insane,” Granville told the reporter. That was his excuse—he was crazy, but just for a while. He was over it now.

  I studied the sad, baggy face in the Exponent’s photograph. He looked so frail. It seemed as if the tiny dots of ink on the page might spread, and he’d disappear like the cloud of bugs hovering over the swamp. I almost wanted to write him a letter, but what could I say—that I’d always liked him because of his funny name? That I thought mistakes—even big ones—should be forgiven? That he and I would always be together, in my mind, because we’d suffered our downfalls at the same time?

  Nonsense. I flipped the page of the paper, looking for something to cheer me up. The Cubs had lost again, this time to the Cardinals. Take that, Mr. Vernon. Ava Gardner was starring in Bhowanii Junction at the Grinstead. An ad showed her dressed for safari, looking totally out of place and uncomfortable. In the letters column, I noticed a small headline, MORE ON WITCHES. My stomach burned. The letter was signed “A Loving Mother,” but I knew immediately it was from Bunny.

  Somebody who calls herself “A Concerned Mother” (Letters, July 27), claims to be worried about “Witches” in Katydid. Well, I don’t believe in witches, but I do know that bad mothers exist, and Katydid seems to have more than its share of them. I’m talking about mothers who spend more time at the beauty parlor than they do with their children; mothers who are more interested in their neighbors’ families than in their own; mothers who worry about losing their husbands instead of taking care of them; mothers who talk to their friends more than they talk to their children; and mothers who think they should be able to tell everyone else how to run their lives. This used to be a nice, simple town, where people were left alone to do as they pleased. Now, everyone is snooping around so much we might as well be in Russia. I’d like to meet this “Concerned Mother.” I’d like to look her in the eye. Maybe she’s right about there being witches in Katydid after all. Indeed, I think she is right. After rereading her letter, I’m convinced. As a matter of fact, I bet she saw a witch this very day—when she got out of bed and looked in the mirror.

  I read the letter over several times. It had all the signs of Bunny’s thinking—the talk about motherhood, the accusations about snooping, the belief that Katydid had once been different, and better, than it is today. There was even a sort of rhetorical flourish to the language that sounded like Bunny when she got riled up. I could almost hear her reciting the letter line for line, punching the air with her fist at each semicolon.

  Mrs. Vernon came up behind me again and looked over my shoulder. She’d seen the letter earlier, and now she reached down and put a thin finger on top of it. “I can’t imagine why they printed this thing,” she said. “Whoever wrote it is obviously disturbed.”

  NINETEEN

  It was too rainy to take a walk that afternoon, so Reverend Vaughn suggested that we drive over to the Dairy Queen for a couple of chocolate-dip cones. I scrunched into his Metropolitan. With knees and elbows poking in all directions, the minister and I filled up the front seat. I tried
to press against the door panel, but I was practically sitting in his lap. Reaching for the ignition, he brushed my leg. The windows steamed up and, in the close air, I imagined my breath smelled terrible.

  When we got to the Dairy Queen, a line of customers stretched out in front of the service window—even in the worst weather, the Dairy Queen always has a line. We waited under the tin awning in front while the rain drilled gently overhead and dripped down in a soft, wet curtain around us. At the window, finally, Reverend Vaughn bought two medium chocolate-dip cones, and we sat on a protected bench along the side of the building.

  “Mondays are such a letdown,” he said, after nibbling the chocolate tip off his cone. “I hate Mondays.”

  “I thought it was the start of your weekend.”

  “That’s the trouble,” he said. “I get all worked up over a sermon, and then, on Sunday, it just disappears into thin air. What have I got to show for it?”

  “People are thinking about it.”

  “Yeah? Maybe. Sometimes I wish I was, say, a cobbler or a furniture maker—someone who actually produced something, you know, an object. Think of working all week and then having a nice, solid chair. You could show it to your friends, take a picture of it. Hell, you could sit in it.”

  “But this way you’re using your head.”

  “My head only gets in the way.” His ice cream started to drip, spilling down the side of the cone onto his fingers. He slurped along the edge of the chocolate with his tongue and then borrowed my napkin to mop up. “Why can’t they make this stuff colder, so you can at least have a normal conversation before it melts?” he grumbled.

  A maroon Chevy packed with hoods cruised down Walker Street, slowing to check out the action at the Dairy Queen. A boy in the front seat spotted me and called out something I couldn’t understand.