Past Perfect, Present Tense

by Richard Peck

  So then I knew she meant business.

  * * *

  That’s how Mama and I went to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, that summer of 1904. We studied up on it, and Dad read the Fair literature along with us. Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds. They said the Fair covered twelve hundred acres, and we tried to see that in our minds, how many farms that would amount to. And all we learned about the Fair filled my heart to overflowing and struck me dumb with dread.

  Mama weakened some. She found out when the Schumates were going, and we planned to go at the same time, just so we’d know somebody there. But we didn’t take the same train.

  When the great day came, Dad drove us to town where the Wabash Cannonball stopped on its way to St. Louis. If he’d turned the trap around and taken us back home, you wouldn’t have heard a peep out of me. And I think Mama was the same. But then we were on the platform with the big locomotive thundering in, everything too quick now, and too loud.

  We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We’d heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there’s enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We’d go to their fair, but we weren’t going to drink their water.

  When the people sitting across from us went to the dining car, Mama and I spread checkered napkins over our knees and had our noon meal out of the hamper. All the while, hot wind blew clinkers and soot in the window as we raced along like a crazed horse. Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago. Leaning forward, she spoke, though we didn’t know her from Adam. “Would you know where the ladies’ restroom is?” she inquired.

  We stared blankly back, but then Mama said, politely, “No, but you’re welcome to rest here till them other people come back.”

  The woman blinked at us, then darted away, hurrying now. I chewed on that a minute, along with my ham sandwich. Then I said, “Mama, do you suppose they have a privy on the train?”

  “A what?” she said.

  Finally, we had to know. Putting the valise on my seat and the hamper on hers, Mama and I went to explore. We walked through the swaying cars, from seat to seat, the cornflowers on Mama’s hat aquiver. Sure enough, we came to a door at the end of a car with a sign reading: LADIES. We crowded inside, and there it was. A water closet like you’d find in town and a chain hanging down and a roll of paper. “Well, I’ve seen everything now,” Mama said. “You wouldn’t catch me sitting on that thing in a moving train. I’d fall off.”

  But I wanted to know how it worked and reached for the handle on the chain. “Just give it a little jerk,” Mama said.

  We stared down as I did, and the bottom of the pan was on a hinge. It dropped open, and there below were the ties of the Wabash tracks racing along in reverse beneath us.

  We both jumped back and hit the door. And we made haste back to our seats. I guess we were lucky not to have found the lady with the bird on her hat in there, sitting down.

  Then before I was ready, we were crossing the Mississippi River on a high trestle. There was nothing between us and brown water. I put my hand over my eyes, but not before I glimpsed St. Louis on the far bank, sweeping away in the haze of heat as far as the eye could see.

  * * *

  We didn’t stay at the Inside Inn. They wanted two dollars a night for a room, three if they fed you. We booked into a rooming house not far from the main gate, where we got a big square room upstairs with two beds for a dollar. It was run by a severe lady, Mrs. Wolfe, with a small, moon-faced son named Thomas clinging to her skirts. The place suited Mama, once she’d pulled down the bedclothes in case of bugs. It didn’t matter where we laid our heads as long as it was clean.

  We walked to the Fair that afternoon, following the crowds, trying to act like everybody else. Once again I’d have turned back if Mama said to. It wasn’t the awful grandeur of the pavilions rising white in the sun. It was all those people. I didn’t know there were that many people in the world. They scared me at first, then I couldn’t see enough. My eyes began to drink deep.

  We took the Intramural electric railroad that ran around the Exposition grounds, making stops. The Fair passed before us, and it didn’t take me long to see what I was looking for. It was hard to miss. At the Palace of Transportation stop, I told Mama this was where we got off.

  There it rose before us, two hundred and fifty feet high. It was the giant wheel, the invention of George Washington Gale Ferris. A great wheel with thirty-six cars on it, each holding sixty people. It turned as we watched, and people were getting on and off like it was nothing to them.

  “No power on earth would get me up in that thing,” Mama murmured.

  But I opened my hand and showed her the dollar extra Dad had slipped me to ride the wheel. “Dad said it would give us a good view of the Fair,” I said in a wobbly voice.

  “It would give me a stroke,” Mama said. But then she set her jaw. “Your dad is putting me to the test. He thinks I won’t do it.”

  Gathering her skirts, she surged forth to the line of people waiting to ride the wheel.

  We wouldn’t look up while we waited, but we heard the creaking of all that naked steel. “That is the sound of doom,” Mama muttered. Then too soon they were ushering us into a car, and I began to babble out of sheer fear.

  “A lady named Mrs. Nicholson rode standing on the roof of one of these cars when the wheel was up at the Chicago fair.”

  Mama turned on me. “What in the world for?”

  “She was a daredevil, I guess.”

  “She was out of her mind,” Mama said.

  Now we were inside, and people mobbed the windows as we swooped up. I meant to stand in the middle of our car and watch the floor, but I looked out. Now we were above the roofs and towers of the Fair, a white city unfolding. There was the Grand Basin with the gondolas drifting. There was the mighty Festival Hall. Mama chanced a look.

  It was cooler up here. My unforgiving Warner’s Rust-Proof Corset had held me in a death grip all day, but you could breathe easier up here. Then we paused, dangling at the top. Now we were at one with the birds, like hawks hovering over the Fair.

  “How many windpumps high are we?” Mama pondered. As we began to arch down again, we were both at a window, skinning our eyes to see.

  Giddy when we got out, we staggered on solid ground and had to sit down on an ornamental bench. Now Mama was game for anything. “If they didn’t want an arm and a leg for the fare,” she said, “I’d ride that thing again. Keep the ticket stubs to show your dad we did it.”

  Braver than before, we walked down The Pike as it was still broad daylight. It was lined with sidewalk cafes by the Streets of Cairo and the Palais du Costume, Hagenbeck’s Circus and the Galveston Flood. Because we were parched, we found a table at a place where they served a new drink, tea with ice in it. “How do we know we’re not drinking silt?” Mama wondered, but it cooled us off.

  As quick as you’d sit down anywhere at the Fair, there’d be entertainment. Where we sat in front of the French Village they had a supple young man named Will Rogers doing rope tricks. And music? Everywhere you turned, and all along The Pike the song the world sang that summer: “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the Fair.”

  We sat over our tea and watched the passing parade. Some of these people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Over by the water chutes a gang of rough men waited to glimpse the ankles of women getting out of the boats. But the only thing we saw on The Pike we shouldn’t have was Uncle Schumate weaving out of the saloon bar of the Tyrolean Alps.

  I can’t tell all we saw in our two days at the Fair. We tried to look at things the boys and Dad would want to hear about
—the Hall of Mines and Metallurgy and the livestock. We learned a good deal of history: the fourteen female statues to stand for the states of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and U. S. Grant’s log cabin. But most of what we saw foretold the future. Automobiles and airships and moving pictures.

  Our last night was the Fourth of July. Fifty bands played, some of them on horseback. John Philip Sousa, in gold braid and white, conducted his own marches. Lit in every color, the fountains played to this music and the thunder of the fireworks. And the cavalry from the Boer War exhibit rode in formation, carrying torches.

  Mama turned away from all the army uniforms, thinking of my brothers, I suppose. But when the lights came on, every tower and minaret picked out with electric bulbs, we saw what this new century would be: all the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome, lit by lightning. A new century, with the United States of America showing the way. But you’d have to run hard not to be left behind.

  We saved the floral clock for our last morning. It lay across a hillside next to the Agriculture Palace, and it was beyond anything. The dial of it was 112 feet across, and each giant hand weighed 2,500 pounds. It was all made of flowers, even the numbers. Each hour garden was a plant that opened at that time of day, beginning with morning glories. We stood there in a rapture, waiting for it to strike the hour.

  Then who appeared before us with her Eastman Folding Kodak camera slung around her neck but Aunt Elvera Schumate. To demonstrate her worldliness, she merely nodded like we were all just coming out of church back home. “Well, Mary,” she said to Mama, “I guess this clock shames your garden.”

  Mama dipped her head modestly to show the cornflowers on her hat. “Yes, Elvera,” she said. “I am a humbler woman for this experience,” and Aunt Elvera didn’t quite know what to make of this reply. “Where’s Dorothy?” Mama asked innocently.

  “That child!” Aunt Elvera said. “I couldn’t get her out of the bed at the Inside Inn! She complains of blistered feet. Wait till she has a woman’s corns! I am a martyr to mine. I cannot get her interested in the Fair. She got as far as the bust of President Roosevelt sculpted in butter, but then she faded.” Aunt Elvera cast me a baleful look as if this was all my fault. “Dorothy is going through a phase.”

  But there Aunt Elvera was wrong. Dorothy never was much better than that for the rest of her life. Mama didn’t inquire into Uncle Schumate’s whereabouts. We thought we knew.

  On the train ride home we were seasoned travelers, Mama and I. When the candy butcher hawked his wares through our car, we knew to turn our faces away from his prices. We crossed the Mississippi River on that terrible trestle, and after Edwardsville the land settled into flat fields. Looking out, Mama said, “Corn’s knee-high by the Fourth of July,” because she was thinking ahead to home. “I’ll sleep good tonight without those streetcars clanging outside the window.”

  But they still clanged in my mind, and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” blended with “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis.”

  “But, Mama, how can we just go home after all we’ve seen?”

  Thinking that over, she said, “You won’t have to, you and the boys. It’s your century. It can take you wherever you want to go.” Then she reached over and put her hand on mine, a thing she rarely did. “I’ll keep you back if I can. But I’ll let you go if I must.”

  That thrilled me, and scared me. The great world seemed to swing wide like the gates of the Fair, and I didn’t even have a plan. I hadn’t even put up my hair yet. It seemed to me it was time for that, time to jerk that big bow off the braid hanging down my back and put up my hair in a woman’s way.

  “Maybe in the fall,” said Mama, who was turning into a mind-reader as we steamed through the July fields, heading for home.

  Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground

  The first time I ever saw a dead body, it was Shotgun Cheatham. We were staying with our Grandma Dowdel, and it was the best trip by far we ever made to her house. My sister Mary Alice and I visited at Grandma Dowdel’s every summer when our folks went up to fish in Wisconsin on Dad’s week off.

  “They dump us on her is what they do,” Mary Alice said. She’d have been about nine the year they buried Shotgun. She didn’t like going to Grandma’s because you had to go outside to the privy. A big old snaggletoothed tomcat lived in the cobhouse, and as quick as you’d come out of the privy, he’d jump at you. Mary Alice hated that.

  I liked going because we went on the train. You could go about anywhere on a train in those days, and I didn’t care where a train went as long as I was on it. The tracks cut through the town where Grandma Dowdel lived, and people stood out on their porches to see the train go through. It was a town that size.

  Mary Alice said that there was nothing to do and nobody to do it with, so she’d tag after me, though I was three years older and a boy. We’d stroll uptown, which was three brick buildings: the bank, the general merchandise, and The Coffee Pot Cafe where the old saloon had stood. Prohibition was on in those days, so people made beer at home. They still had the tin roofs out over the sidewalk and hitching rails. Most farmers came to town horse-drawn, though there were Fords, and the banker drove a Hupmobile.

  But it was a slow place except for the time they buried Shotgun Cheatham. He might have made it unnoticed all the way to the grave except for his name. The county seat newspaper didn’t want to run an obituary on anybody called Shotgun, but nobody knew any other name for him. This sparked attention from some of the bigger newspapers. One sent in a stringer to nose around The Coffee Pot Cafe for a human-interest story since it was August, a slow month for news.

  The Coffee Pot was where people went to loaf, talk tall, and swap gossip. Mary Alice and I were regulars there, and even we were of some interest because we were kin of Mrs. Dowdel’s, who never set foot in the place. She kept herself to herself, which was uphill work in a town like that.

  Mary Alice and I carried the tale home that a suspicious type had come off the train in citified clothes and a stiff straw hat. He stuck out a mile and was asking around about Shotgun Cheatham. And he was taking notes.

  Grandma had already heard it on the grapevine that Shotgun was no more, though she wasn’t the first person people ran to with news. She wasn’t what you’d call a popular woman. Grandpa Dowdel had been well thought of, but he was long gone.

  That day she was working tomatoes on the black iron range, and her kitchen was hot enough to steam the calendars off the wall. Her sleeves were turned back, and she had arms on her like a man. When she heard the town was apt to fill up with newspaper reporters, her jaw clenched.

  Presently she said, “I’ll tell you what that reporter’s after. He wants to get the horselaugh on us because he thinks we’re nothing but a bunch of hayseeds and no-’count country people. We are, but what business is it of his?”

  “Who was Shotgun Cheatham anyway?” Mary Alice asked.

  “He was just an old reprobate who lived poor and died broke,” Grandma said. “Nobody went near him because he smelled like a polecat. He lived in a chicken coop, and now they’ll have to burn it down.”

  To change the subject she said to me, “Here, you stir these tomatoes, and don’t let them stick. I’ve stood in this heat till I’m half-cooked myself.”

  I hated it when Grandma gave me kitchen work. I wished it was her day for apple butter. She made that outdoors over an open fire, and she put pennies in the cauldron to keep it from sticking.

  “Down at The Coffee Pot they say Shotgun rode with the James boys.”

  “Which James boys?” Grandma asked.

  “Jesse James,” I said, “and Frank.”

  “They wouldn’t have had him,” she said. “Anyhow, them Jameses was Missouri people.”

  “They were telling the reporter Shotgun killed a man and went to the penitentiary.”

  “Several around here done that,” Grandma said, “though I don’t recall him being out of town any length of time. Who’s doing all this talking?”

 
“A real old, humped-over lady with buck teeth,” Mary Alice said.

  “Cross-eyed?” Grandma said. “That’d be Effie Wilcox. You think she’s ugly now, you should have seen her as a girl. And she’d talk you to death. Her tongue’s attached in the middle and flaps at both ends.” Grandma was over by the screen door for a breath of air.

  “They said he’d notched his gun in six places,” I said, pushing my luck. “They said the notches were either for banks he’d robbed or for sheriffs he’d shot.”

  “Was that Effie again? Never trust an ugly woman. She’s got a grudge against the world,” said Grandma, who was no oil painting herself. She fetched up a sigh. “I’ll tell you how Shotgun got his name. He wasn’t but about ten years old, and he wanted to go out and shoot quail with a bunch of older boys. He couldn’t hit a barn wall from the inside, and he had a sty in one eye. They were out there in a pasture without a quail in sight, but Shotgun got all excited being with the big boys. He squeezed off a round and killed a cow. Down she went. If he’d been aiming at her, she’d have died of old age eventually. The boys took the gun off him, not knowing who he’d plug next. That’s how he got the name, and it stuck to him like flypaper. Any girl in town could have outshot him, and that includes me.” Grandma jerked a thumb at herself.

  She kept a twelve-gauge double-barreled Winchester Model 21 behind the woodbox, but we figured it had been Grandpa Dowdel’s for shooting ducks. “And I wasn’t no Annie Oakley myself, except with squirrels.” Grandma was still at the door, fanning her apron. Then in the same voice she said, “Looks like we got company. Take them tomatoes off the fire.”

  A stranger was on the porch, and when Mary Alice and I crowded up behind Grandma to see, it was the reporter. He was sharp-faced, and he’d sweated through his hatband.

  “What’s your business?” Grandma said through screen wire, which was as friendly as she got.

  “Ma’am, I’m making inquiries about the late Shotgun Cheatham.” He shuffled his feet, wanting to get one of them in the door. Then he mopped up under his hat brim with a silk handkerchief. His Masonic ring had diamond chips in it.