A Season of Gifts (16 page)

• What is the relationship between the Barnhart kids from
A Season of Gifts
—Bob, Ruth Ann, and Phyllis—and Mrs. Dowdel? How are their experiences similar to those of Grandma Dowdel and her grandchildren in both
A Long Way from Chicago
and
A Year Down Yonder?
How are they different?

• Moving to a new town is always difficult, but especially when, as Mrs. Barnhart says, “All eyes are upon us.” What does that mean? How does that influence the way the Barnharts act in town? What is the town’s reaction to them both before school starts and in school?

• What does Bob think of Mrs. Dowdel when he first moves in next door? How does his opinion of her change?

• Who are the Cowgills, the Flukes, the Leapers, and the Burdicks? How do their interactions with the Barnharts, Mrs. Dowdel, and the rest of the town shape the story? What is Mrs. Dowdel’s relationship to them and how does she ultimately give them all that they deserve?

•
Why does Ruth Ann idolize Mrs. Dowdel? What does Ruth Ann learn from Mrs. Dowdel and what does Mrs. Dowdel gain from having Ruth Ann around?

• After moving, Phyllis seems to be getting into more and more trouble. When did you first notice that she might be doing things she shouldn’t? When do the other characters notice what she’s doing? How does Mrs. Dowdel help to stop Phyllis from spinning totally out of control?

• Mrs. Dowdel acts aloof and uninterested, but she does a lot to help the Barnharts when they are settling in next door. What are some of the things she does for the family? How does she carry off all her schemes? And how do the Barnharts repay her many gifts to them?

• Which characters apart from Mrs. Dowdel can you recognize from
A Year Down Yonder
and
A Long Way from Chicago
? How do those characters interact with Mrs. Dowdel? What similarities do you see in the way people in the same family act even after so much time has gone by?

• How have the Barnharts changed by the end of the story as a result of their interactions with Mrs. Dowdel? What situations have changed as a result of Mrs. Dowdel’s involvement and what were the outcomes? How is
A Season of Gifts
an appropriate title for this story?

It was a happy day for me and my career when Grandma Dowdel strode into my life. She came courtesy of a colleague, Harry Mazer. He was putting together an anthology of gun stories (
Twelve Shots
, Delacorte Press, 1997). However unlikely and politically questionable a volume of gun stories for young readers might seem, I wanted to contribute. I looked up and there at my study door stood Grandma Dowdel, larger than life with a Winchester in her hand—locked and loaded.

Her story became “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground,” and when the editor of my books read it, she suggested it as the first chapter of a whole novel starring Grandma Dowdel. That book became
A Long Way from Chicago
as Grandma expanded to fill it cover to cover.

In Robert Frost’s useful phrase, way leads on to way. In 1999,
A Long Way from Chicago
won a Newbery Honor from the American Library Association. And when that happens, your editor calls for a sequel. Happily, Grandma Dowdel had two grandchildren: Joey to narrate the first book and Mary Alice for the sequel,
A Year Down Yonder.
It won the 2001 Newbery Medal.

Letters keep coming from readers of all ages, inquiring about Grandma Dowdel. “Was she
your
grandmother?” the letters ask.

Did my grandmother, Mrs. Owen Peck of Cerro Gordo, Illinois, steal the sheriff’s boat to trap fish illegally? Did she drive a tractor into a pecan tree, at full speed? Did she spike the punch at a Daughters of the American Revolution tea? Well, no. When you’re a writer, you can give yourself the grandmother you wish you’d had.

But the town she lives in is the town where my grandmother lived, and the house with the lightning rods on the roof and the snowball bushes crowding the bay window is my grandmother’s. And my own grandmother was six feet tall even without the crown of snow-white hair. And she wore aprons the size of Alaska.

But Grandma Dowdel is her own person, created to communicate with young readers today: an encouragement to be that independent and resourceful and—secretly—that loving. But Grandma Dowdel didn’t drop down from my family tree. Fiction isn’t what
was.
It’s
what if?
And a novelist is one who believes that real life can always be improved upon.

Richard Peck

A Long Way from Chicago

HC: 978-0-8037-2290-3

PB: 978-0-14-130352-9

PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS PB EDITION: 978-0-14-240110-1

A Newbery Honor Book

A National Book Award Finalist

An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

An ALA Notable Children’s Book

A
Horn Book
Fanfare selection

“A small masterpiece of storytelling.”

—
The Horn Book
, starred review

“Remarkable and fine.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review

“Part vaudeville act, part laconic tall tale, the stories, with their dirty tricks and cunning plots, make you laugh out loud. . . .”

—
Booklist
, starred review

1929

Y
ou wouldn’t think we’d have to leave Chicago to see a dead body. We were growing up there back in the bad old days of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Just the winter before, they’d had the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre over on North Clark Street. The city had such an evil reputation that the Thompson submachine gun was better known as a “Chicago typewriter.”

But I’d grown to the age of nine, and my sister Mary Alice was seven, and we’d yet to see a stiff. We guessed that most of them were where you couldn’t see them, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, wearing concrete overshoes.

No, we had to travel all the way down to our Grandma Dowdel’s before we ever set eyes on a corpse. Dad said Mary Alice and I were getting to the age when we could travel on our own. He said it was time we spent a week with Grandma, who was getting on in years. We hadn’t seen anything of her since we were tykes. Being Chicago people, Mother and Dad didn’t have a car. And Grandma wasn’t on the telephone.

“They’re dumping us on her is what they’re doing,” Mary Alice said darkly. She suspected that Mother and Dad would take off for a week of fishing up in Wisconsin in our absence.

I didn’t mind going because we went on the train, the Wabash Railroad’s crack Blue Bird that left Dearborn Station every morning, bound for St. Louis. Grandma lived somewhere in between, in one of those towns the railroad tracks cut in two. People stood out on their porches to see the train go through.

Mary Alice said she couldn’t stand the place. For one thing, at Grandma’s you had to go outside to the privy. It stood just across from the cobhouse, a tumbledown shed full of stuff left there in Grandpa Dowdel’s time. 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.

Mary Alice said there was nothing to do and nobody to do it with, so she’d tag after me, though I was two years older and a boy. We’d stroll uptown in those first days. It was only a short block of brick buildings: the bank, the insurance agency, Moore’s Store, and The Coffee Pot Cafe, where the old saloon had stood. Prohibition was on in those days, which meant that selling liquor was against the law. So people made their own 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, L. J. Weidenbach, drove a Hupmobile.