A Long Way From Chicago (4 page)

“What’s come over you?” Grandma said in her least interested voice.

Mrs. Wilcox whimpered. “Send them kids out of your kitchen so I can tell you.”

“They’re having their breakfast,” Grandma said, “and they’re from Chicago, so they’ve heard everything.”

“Well, it was last night,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “They come on my place and wrenched up my you-know-what by the posts and flung it all over the yard.”

“They knocked over your privy three months ahead of Halloween?” Grandma was interested at last. “What’s the world coming to?”

“That’s what I said,” Mrs. Wilcox replied. “I’m too nervous to live. All the laws of civilization has broke down, and town life is getting too dangerous. My only consolation is that there’s a prayer meeting at church tomorrow night. And I’ve got me some praying to do.”

“Do that,” Grandma said. But Mrs. Wilcox couldn’t wait another minute. She darted off the porch and down the path to our privy.

Grandma settled into her chair to smother her last pancake with corn syrup. Then once again she said, “Cowgills.”

Presently, Mary Alice slipped down from her chair and headed outside. When she got to the screen door, Grandma said, “I wouldn’t use the privy all morning if I was you.”

That next morning when I came into the kitchen, a sight stopped me dead in the door. Behind me, Mary Alice pulled up short too. Next to a box of shells, Grandpa Dowdel’s old double-barreled Winchester Model 21 was on the
kitchen table, along with a greasy rag, like Grandma meant to clean it. Just the sight of that gun made my ears ring. Then I saw somebody besides Grandma was in the kitchen, over by the door.

He was a big, tall galoot of a kid with narrow eyes. His gaze kept flitting to the shotgun. The uniform he had on was all white with a cap to match. In his hand was a wire holder for milk bottles. He was ready to make his escape, but Grandma was saying, “I hope I have better luck with your milk today than the last batch. I found a dead mouse in your delivery yesterday.”

The kid’s narrow eyes widened. “Naw you never,” he said.

“Be real careful about calling a customer a liar,” she remarked. “I had to feed that milk to the cat. And the mouse too, of course.”

“Naw,” the kid said, reaching around for the knob on the screen door behind him.

Grandma was telling one of her whoppers. If she’d found a mouse in the milk, she’d have exploded like the mailbox. She was telling a whopper, and I wondered why.

“And another thing,” she said. “I won’t be needing a delivery tomorrow, neither milk nor cream. I’m going away.”

First we’d heard of it. Mary Alice nudged me hard.

“I’ll be gone tonight and all day tomorrow, and I don’t want the milk left out where it’ll sour. I won’t pay for it. I’m taking my grandkids on a visit to my cousin Leota Shrewsbury.”

Another whopper, and a huge one. Grandma off on a jaunt and us with her? I didn’t think so. She didn’t
do things that cost. And she never told anybody her business.

Turning from the stove, she pretended surprise at seeing Mary Alice and me there, though she had eyes in the back of her head. “Why, there’s my grandkids now.” She pointed us out with a spatula. “They’re from Chicago. Gangs run that town, you know,” she told the kid. “My grandson’s in a gang, so you don’t want to mess with him. He’s meaner than he looks.”

I hung in the doorway, bug-eyed and short. She was saying I—Joey Dowdel—was a tough guy from Chicago, and this kid was twice my size. He could eat me for lunch.

“This here’s Ernie Cowgill,” she said, finishing off the introductions. With a sneer at me, Ernie Cowgill disappeared through the door and stomped off the porch.

“Grandma,” I croaked, “you’ll get me killed.”

She waved that away. “I just said that for your protection. He’ll be scared of you now. He’d believe anything. He’s only in fourth grade.”

“Grandma, he’s at least sixteen.”

“That’s right. And still in fourth grade,” she said. “He’s the runt of the Cowgill litter. He’s got three older brothers, and they’re big bruisers. They’re the ones you wouldn’t want to meet up with in a dark alley.”

She swept shotgun, shells, and the greasy rag off the kitchen table and put them all back behind the woodbox. Then she nodded at Mary Alice to set the table for breakfast.

When we sat down to eat, I said, “Grandma, what was the shotgun for?”

“Bait,” she said.

“Who’s Cousin Leota Shrewsbury?” Mary Alice asked.

“Who?” Grandma said.

I lurked pretty near home all day. I didn’t even go uptown to The Coffee Pot Cafe for fear I’d run into Ernie Cowgill and his brothers. Now I remembered where I’d heard the name. The horse-drawn milk wagon that delivered to the door had a sign on its side that read:

C
OWGILLS’
D
AIRY
F
ARM

FROM OUR CLOVER-FED COWS TO YOUR KITCHEN

STRICTLY SANITARY

FARM-FRESH EGGS OUR SPECIALTY

In fact, I’d seen Ernie driving it standing up, handling the reins through a hole in the front window of the wagon. Even at a distance he looked like somebody you wouldn’t want to know better.

It may have been just a coincidence that a family named Cowgill ran the dairy. I never knew.

Noticing how close to home I was keeping, Grandma told me to weed the garden. You didn’t want to hang around her too close, or she’d give you a job. The garden ran neat and tidy from the back porch down to the cobhouse beside the yard where she stretched her clothesline. I weeded through the heat of the day, and every time I got down by the cobhouse, I had a vision of all four Cowgill brothers stepping out of it. I could picture them hanging
me from the eaves by my belt and taking turns slapping me to sleep. But I saw nothing but the crossed paws of the old tomcat, napping just inside the door.

The two rows of green onions made my eyes water, and the smell was making me woozy. I was thinking seriously of heatstroke when I heard Mary Alice shriek in the kitchen. She was no screamer, so it brought me to my feet. Now I thought Ernie Cowgill had gotten in and pounced on her. I jumped the garden rows, pounding for the house.

But it was only Grandma and Mary Alice in the kitchen. Mary Alice’s eyes were big as quarters, like Orphan Annie’s, and she had both hands clapped over her mouth. Grandma towered over the table. Held high in her hand was a mousetrap, with the mouse still in it. A good-sized mouse. Its tail dangled down so far, it looked like one of the flypaper strips that hung from her kitchen ceiling. The spring on the trap had caught the mouse at the neck and nearly pulled his head loose. He was hanging by a thread and not a pretty sight.

Mary Alice had already gone into shock. This was one more of those experiences she says gave her nightmares for years.

Grandma examined her catch. Now she moved the trap into position over the mouth of an empty bottle. She eased up the spring, and the mouse dropped straight in. He hit the bottom of the bottle with a soft thump.

She turned back to the drainboard and picked up another bottle, full of milk—fresh, I suppose, from Ernie Cowgill’s morning delivery. Without spilling a drop, she
poured milk into the bottle on the table. Mary Alice and I watched like two paralyzed people as the milk rose around the mouse’s furry gray body until his whiskers began to float. As the milk closed over his head, Mary Alice bolted. If the back door had been latched, she’d have gone straight through screen wire.

Now Grandma was fitting a paper lid over the milk-and-mouse bottle. I knew not to ask why she was doing this. I didn’t even want to know.

Mary Alice didn’t come back in the house till supper time. Then she didn’t want any supper. I watched her move green beans and fatback around the plate with the fork big in her small hand. Grandma ate hearty. After a big wedge of layer cake she pulled back from the table. “Let’s step right along and get them dishes washed and dried and put up,” she said. She was in a hurry, and I couldn’t see why. But then I couldn’t see a moment ahead.

There was still some evening left, but the light was fading. Grandma stayed in the kitchen after we’d wandered into the front room. But as Mary Alice was reaching for her jump rope to take outside, Grandma turned up and said, “Not tonight.”

Mary Alice glowered but said nothing. She flopped on the settee and fidgeted. Then she started to go upstairs. She’d brought a book called
The Hidden Staircase
by Carolyn Keene, and she liked reading in bed. “Not tonight,” Grandma said. She sat at her ease in the platform rocker, with her sewing basket at her feet. She didn’t do much fancy needlework, but she mended everything. Mary Alice
came over to lean against me while I worked on Colonel Lindbergh.

When it got so dark I couldn’t see the puzzle, I reached to turn on the lamp. But Grandma said, “Not tonight.”

By then we had to know we were in for something. “Shut the front door,” Grandma told Mary Alice, who was just a little gray shape, mouselike, as she went over to close it. “And shoot the bolt across,” said Grandma, who never locked her doors.

Now we three were only outlines in the dark parlor. Some plot was afoot. Mary Alice edged back on the settee. We were all waiting for something. It was dark now. I could picture what the house looked like from outside. Locked up, not a light showing upstairs or down. All of us gone away to visit Cousin Leota Shrewsbury, who didn’t exist. Half an hour passed. Then Grandma spoke, making us leap. “We could tell ghost stories,” she said.

“Not tonight,” Mary Alice said in a small voice.