A Season of Gifts

by Richard Peck

  I couldn’t see this part at all, but Mrs. Dowdel had gone to work running the knife around the shell to cut it loose from the skin, sawing in a circle. I could only see this happening in Ruth Ann’s face. She was as interested as she’d ever been in anything in her life.

  Mrs. Dowdel seemed to work the skin off the turtle’s feet. She lifted the shell like the lid off a stew pot and set it rolling away toward a garden row. Ruth Ann watched it go.

  Finally Mrs. Dowdel heaved herself upright. With a small mess of turtle guts in her cupped hands, she went over to the fire and threw them in. Ruth Ann’s mouth hung open. She was all eyes and mouth. Even her braids looked interested.

  Mrs. Dowdel worked over the rest of the turtle, carving up the parts you can eat to fry for her supper. She didn’t bring over any for us, but there’s not a lot of eating in one turtle.

  But the point is from that day on, the afternoon of the turtle, Ruth Ann was Mrs. Dowdel’s shadow. And Mrs. Dowdel let her be. Ever after, Ruth Ann seemed to forget she’d ever lived in Terre Haute, or anywhere but here.

  Phyllis didn’t get home till five on that particular afternoon. There’d been high school meetings about upcoming fall events: a sock hop, a hayride, corn-husking, homecoming. Somebody gave her a ride home.

  * * *

  Counting us Barnharts, nine people showed up at Dad’s first service that next Sunday. I ushered, wearing a white shirt and a necktie of Dad’s. It was longer than my fly. I could have put everybody in one pew, but I scattered them around. Still, Dad could count, and it wasn’t much of a turnout.

  One lady wore a Mackinaw jacket and a hat with a veil. Her eyes were all over the place, and her teeth came out to meet you.

  “I ain’t Methodist,” she warned me as I steered her at a pew. “I’m from the church across the tracks, so I’m wash-foot. I’m just here to see how the heathens worship.” She grinned quite friendly through her veil, and her teeth were a real assortment. She said she was Mrs. Wilcox.

  Mother sat up front in her summer dress. Next to her was Ruth Ann with six or eight hollyhock dolls to fill out the pew. Phyllis sat on the back row, writing a letter. I passed the plate. Pollen blew in through the torn windows. Dad said, “Let us make a joyful noise,” and we tried a hymn, “Blessed Assurance.” But we tapered off.

  Dad cut his sermon short so we’d be out ahead of the United Brethren. The wash-foot congregation across the tracks went on for another hour. Mrs. Wilcox had time to catch it on her way home.

  After church we counted out the offering on our kitchen table. A dollar twelve, and two meat ration tokens from World War II and a small scattering of S&H Green Stamps.

  “Great oaks from little acorns grow,” Dad said, not too certain. Mother didn’t look certain at all.

  Mrs. Dowdel hadn’t turned up, but it was well known that she wasn’t a church woman. Where would she find the time? As the fall days got shorter, hers got longer. She’d put up a carload of corn relish. The labels on the Ball jars were written out in a hand that looked like Ruth Ann’s printing, though she’d had help with the spelling.

  CORN RELISH

  1958

  It was getting harder to keep Ruth Ann home. Mother about gave up trying.

  A jar of corn relish rolled all the way over onto our porch. The tarp I’d once worn was stretched on Mrs. Dowdel’s side yard, thick with drying black walnuts. The stove lengths began to rise in piles on her back porch. She could see winter from here.

  I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t see a day ahead. Typical of me, the next time trouble broke out next door, I was sound asleep.

  The Fall of the Year

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Haunted Melon Patch

  Evidently Mrs. Dowdel always had extra trouble in the fall of the year. Nameless figures were known to sneak down behind the houses to her patch and swipe her melons. It was kind of a local tradition. Dating couples had been flushed out of this same location.

  The town knew Mrs. Dowdel was armed and dangerous. But high school kids would figure that trying to steal a half-ripe watermelon was worth the risk of getting your head blown off.

  Even after her long days, Mrs. Dowdel sat guard down there. You could see her on sentry duty from our back porch. She made herself pretty comfortable. There was a nip in the air now, but she’d put together a little stove from cinder-blocks and an oven rack. A pot of camp coffee brewed on the grille. She buried baking potatoes under the fire. There she hunkered on two overturned pails in a cap with flaps and three or four afghans. Her melons and squash were coming on. Behind her on the vines climbing the cobhouse, her gourds were ready.

  So was she. The Winchester was always across her big knees, unless she was cleaning it by firelight.

  Maybe sitting out in the hazy night, watching the sparks rise to join the stars, gave Mrs. Dowdel ideas. Maybe she even saw weird visions in the firelight’s flicker. Who knows?

  A rumor about that particular melon patch began to drift through town. At first it wasn’t louder than the whisper of dry leaves. A word here. A word there. It could have come from anywhere. Then it broke into print in the county seat newspaper. A column called “News From Our Outlying Communities” appeared in the Piatt County Call:

  STRANGE SIGHTINGS

  IN RURAL VICINITY

  According to Mrs. Dowdel, a lifelong resident, there is no truth to the story making the rounds of one of our smaller villages. In a melon patch at the rear of the Dowdel property, rumor reports that an Unexplained Presence has been sighted by various intruders in the dark of night. Young couples have fled the patch in terror, leaving behind half-empty bottles of Thunderbird wine, picnic blankets, and several transistor radios.

  “Horsefeathers,” Mrs. Dowdel is quoted as saying, or a very similar word. “I ain’t seen a thing out of the ordinary, and I’m in my patch very nearly every night to discourage the juvenile delinquents who is taking over the town.”

  However, the elderly landowner admitted that her property and outbuildings are built over an ancient Kickapoo burial ground.

  “Oh pshaw,” Mrs. Dowdel expostulated. “As kids we was forever digging up arrowheads and calabashes and all them ancient relics. Beadwork and such stuff. Once in a great while a skull would surface, or a dog would dig up something.”

  And the Unexplained Presence?

  “Some used to say they’d seen the ghost of a girl in a feathered headdress and moccasins,” Mrs. Dowdel recalled. “You know how people talk. They called her the Kickapoo Princess.”

  When our reporter inquired if she’d ever seen the ghostly Kickapoo Princess herself, the aged matron replied, “Me? I got enough aggravation from the living without messing with the dead.”

  Asked for a final word on the subject, Mrs. Dowdel said, “Keep off my property. You know who you are. The next ghost you see could be you.”

  After this news broke, the rumor of spooky doings in the melon patch spread far out into the county.

  A steady line of cars and trucks edged along our street every evening, bumper to bumper. People craned their necks for a glimpse of anything they could see. Flashbulbs popped from backseats. Mrs. Dowdel’s cobhouse blocked most of the view. But people could see the glow of her campfire like an eerie halo above.

  “You children,” Mother said in a weary voice, “keep completely out of this. Where’s Ruth Ann?”

  In a day or two the police chief and the newspaper were swamped with reports of strange lights in the night and sudden sounds.

  We Barnharts were used to sudden sounds by now. It was the hunting season, at least in Mrs. Dowdel’s mind. Pintails, mallards, teals, the first of the migrating Canada geese often flapped their last over her property. Any time before dark you were apt to hear the full voice of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Then something on the wing would stop short in the sky and drop like a rock. And whether it was actually pheasant season or not, it was too late to warn the pheasant.

  Another week or so, and rumors of the ghost princess began
to blend with last year’s big news. People remembered how the Russians had sent their two Sputnik rockets into orbit, one with a dog riding in it. This brought back the topic of flying saucers.

  Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, granted an interview with the Piatt County Call. She spoke for the membership of the Daughters of the American Revolution, saying:

  “The Russians are perfectly capable of disguising one of their spies as the ghost of an Indian princess or anything else of either sex, not to mention a flying dog. The enemy is already among us. We’re probably radioactive already. We must keep our eyes peeled and support our troops.”

  Over on the high school side, the kids were abuzz. They’d all trespassed on the haunted melon patch at one time or another. But nobody could finger the couples who’d left the Thunderbird wine and picnic blankets and transistor radios behind when the Kickapoo Princess scared them off. A few began to remember they’d seen something they couldn’t put a name to in the melon patch. They milled in the school halls and couldn’t settle. Test scores dropped. A Boy Scout troop working toward Eagle said there ought to be a badge for Ghost Spotting.

  The whole matter might have died down, with football season and corn-husking and high school homecoming on the way. But things took another turn on a certain moonless night. And it wasn’t Boy Scouts. It was girls, a bunch of them. I slept through most of it, up till the screaming and gunfire. But by daybreak the whole town had all the particulars.

  Though high school sororities weren’t allowed, there was one, run by a redhead named Waynetta Blalock. Her mother had been a Lovejoy, and they owned the hybrid seed corn and the grain elevator. The sorority was Iota Nu Beta, which some people said stood for I Oughta Know Better.

  This was the time of year Iota Nu Beta initiated new freshmen girls. Not Phyllis. She said herself she wasn’t eligible since she couldn’t wear makeup and only had two skirts. Waynetta had said all over school that Phyllis was “poor as a church mouse and anyhow not from here.”

  Even down in the grades we heard all about the plans for a secret Iota Nu Beta initiation. Waynetta personally leaked word that it would take place in the vicinity of the Haunted Melon Patch.

  On that moonless Friday night, according to eyewitnesses, the Iota Nu Beta girls met out behind our house, by our car. We had a car. We just didn’t have gas money for it, and it burned a quart of oil if you hit the starter. It was a 1950 Nash four-door. We called it the Pickle because of its shape. Also it was green.

  From over by the parked Pickle the sorority girls could see across the cannas. There Mrs. Dowdel slumped asleep before her dying fire. Out there on flat ground she must have looked like the Rock of Gibraltar. Her shotgun lay broken open and was beginning to slip off her knees. The scene was silent as the grave except for a little ground wind rattling the gourd vine against the cobhouse.

  The first girl to be initiated—first and last—was Barbara Jean Jeeter. She wore babydoll shorty pajamas and Spooly plastic curlers. She had to crawl out in the patch, steal a squash within range of Mrs. Dowdel, and crawl back. The other part of the initiation, to eat a lard sandwich and recite a dirty limerick, was slated for later back at Waynetta’s house.

  Edna-Earl Stubbs and Vanette Pankey, the sorority sergeants at arms, gave Barbara Jean a kick to start her out. Even if she didn’t believe in ghosts, she had to believe in Mrs. Dowdel’s shotgun. So she belly-crawled low, and it would have been pretty dank down in that sandy soil for a girl dressed in as little as Barbara Jean was. But freshmen will do anything to belong.

  Barbara Jean crept on, from melon to melon, from squash to squash. At this point eyewitness reports differ. Vanette Pankey said that even from the Pickle she heard a sound, a rattle of dried beans in a gourd. Edna-Earl Stubbs said no. The first sound was a distant drumbeat, very far-off. Boom, boom, boom—like that. Anyway, it didn’t wake Mrs. Dowdel.

  Then we come to some real confusion. Firelight played against the cobhouse wall. The gourd vine cast fluttering shadows. Waynetta herself said she was the first to see somebody or something standing there, the vines grown up around her. Some creature of the night, or history. Not quite life-size, but definitely there. Another sorority girl said no. The first sighting of the ghost was right up by Mrs. Dowdel, like it had just stepped out from behind her. Or floated. With firelight on its face.

  Wrong, Edna-Earl said. She clearly saw the Kickapoo Princess descending from a great height, probably heaven or the Happy Hunting Ground. Edna-Earl saw a pair of beaded moccasins dangling a good six feet above the ground. Maybe higher.

  They were all scared too speechless to warn Barbara Jean. But they all agreed on one point: The Kickapoo Princess was wearing a full feathered headdress and carried a pair of gourd rattles in her weirdly pale little hands. And they all said her hair was in braids.

  Anyway, here came Barbara Jean through the melons, working along on her elbows. She was within reach of the dying fire and spotting for squash when she heard something or saw something. She jumped up before she thought, stumbled and fell back. Then sat down hard.

  Everybody over by the Pickle heard a snapping sound. Barbara Jean sent up a scream that tore the night in two.

  “HELP!” she shrieked. “I been grabbed. The ghost’s dragging me with her into her grave. SAVE ME!”

  Barbara Jean was heard uptown. She certainly brought Mrs. Dowdel around. She vaulted out of deep sleep, and her pails went over behind her. She fished two shells out of her apron and fed them into the shotgun. Shouldering the butt of the gun into her afghans, she swung wildly.

  “Hold your fire!” Barbara Jean screamed. “I’m already half buried, and the ghost is biting me right on my—”

  KABOOM, KABOOM. Mrs. Dowdel fired twice. A tongue of red flame from each barrel licked the night. People all over the township called the chief of police.

  Barbara Jean’s screams knocked me out of bed. Then the gunplay. When I came out of my room, the door to Phyllis and Ruth Ann’s was closed. How could they sleep through this? I wondered. Downstairs Mother and Dad were on the back porch, wearing blankets. The Pickle stood alone. Seeing a sorority sister in dire danger, the Iota Nu Betas had all hightailed it home to save their own skins. As president, Waynetta Blalock was no doubt in the lead.

  Mrs. Dowdel had already released Barbara Jean from the steel jaws of a spring-action rabbit trap, which had a good firm hold on her where it hurts most.

  Now the red light on the police chief’s Dodge lit up everything. There was enough light to explain any Unexplained Presence. Mrs. Dowdel stood with one hand on her hip, and the shotgun in the crook of her other arm. She’d raised one flap on her cap to hear what Police Chief C. P. Snokes had to say.

  He was as well-armed as she was. But she could out-draw him. “Doggone it, Mrs. Dowdel, discharging a firearm within the city limits is a crime.”

  “So’s trespassing.” Mrs. Dowdel nodded down at Barbara Jean still sprawled among the melons. “Anyhow, who says we’re inside the city limits?”

  A crowd was gathering out at the edge of the light, people from all around the neighborhood in the darnedest array of sleepwear you ever saw.

  “The County Surveyor says so,” C. P. Snokes said. “You know yourself the city limits is that woven-wire fence that runs along the west side of your property.”

  “Do tell.” Mrs. Dowdel poked at her fire with a big shoe. “You talking white man’s law? I’d say this ancient Kickapoo burial ground was here long before the first so-called pioneers.”

  C. P. Snokes scratched up under his cap. “Mrs. Dowdel, are you telling me you live on an Indian reser—”

  “I reserve the right to protect my property is what I’m telling you. Run that gal in,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Read her her rights and book her like they do on the television.”

  C. P. Snokes’s flashlight revealed a no-nonsense, heavy-duty patented rabbit trap nearby Barbara Jean. “That’s a mean-lookin’ rabbit trap,” C. P. Snokes said.

  “But legal,” Mrs. D
owdel said.

  “Catch many rabbits?”

  “Caught one tonight,” she said. “Looks like a snowshoe hare.”

  Sure enough, in the flashlight’s beam Barbara Jean looked a lot like a scared white rabbit in plastic hair curlers and shorty pajamas. Her eyes were pink in the glare. Her nose twitched, though she was still too scared to cry.

  C. P. Snokes got a good look at her. “Doggone it, I can’t run her in.”

  “How come?” Mrs. Dowdel said.

  “She’s the Jeeter girl, the doctor’s daughter. And her mama was a—”

  “I know what her mama was,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Tell her to keep her gal home at night. My motto is, ‘Ready, Fire, Aim.’ Keep that in mind. Next time there won’t be enough of her left to initiate.”

  That pretty well rounded out the night. C. P. Snokes put Barbara Jean in his Dodge. Now she was crying buckets, though he was only taking her home to the Jeeters out on the LaPlace road. The seat of her shorty pajamas hung in tatters. Barbara Jean was crying her eyes out, but she had a good grip on a medium-sized acorn squash.

  Mrs. Dowdel kicked ashes on her embers and went on up to the house, the Winchester over her arm. In these last hours before dawn, the town tried to settle.

  I couldn’t, and was still wide-awake to hear a stealthy foot on the stairs. I peered out of my room just as Phyllis’s form vanished into hers. I followed.

  She nearly jumped over the bed when I turned up there on her heels. Still, she had the sense not to scream. The envelope to a letter she was writing to Elvis Presley was on her table:

  Private Elvis Presley

  “A” Company

  First Medium Tank Battalion

  32nd Regiment

  Fort Hood, Texas.

  She moved between me and it. But I had reason to know she signed all her letters to Elvis,

  Love me tender, Phyllis

  Ruth Ann slept with a night-light. The Elvises loomed over her. The Elvis over Phyllis’s bed glowed in the dark. It was from the Jailhouse Rock movie.