A Season of Gifts (18 page)

I thought that sound would bring the house down around us. I couldn’t hear right for a week. Grandma roared out, “Rest in peace, you old—” Then she let fly with the other barrel.

The reporter came out of the chair and whipped completely around in a circle. Beer bottles went everywhere. The straight route to the front door was in Grandma’s line of fire, and he didn’t have the presence of mind to realize she’d already discharged both barrels. He went out a side window, headfirst, leaving his hat and his notepad behind. Which he feared more, the living dead or Grandma’s aim, he didn’t tarry to tell. Mrs. Wilcox was on her feet, hollering, “The dead is walking, and Mrs. Dowdel’s gunning for me!” She cut and ran out the door and into the night.

When the screen door snapped to behind her, silence fell. Mary Alice hadn’t moved. The first explosion had blasted her awake, but she naturally thought that Grandma had killed her, so she didn’t bother to budge. She says the whole experience gave her nightmares for years after.

A burned-powder haze hung in the room, cutting the smell of Shotgun Cheatham. The white gauze was black rags now, and Grandma had blown the lid clear of the coffin. She’d have blown out all three windows in the bay, except they were open. As it was, she’d pitted her woodwork bad and topped the snowball bushes outside. But apart from scattered shot, she hadn’t disfigured Shotgun Cheatham any more than he already was.

Grandma stood there savoring the silence. Then she turned toward the kitchen with the twelve-gauge loose in her hand. “Time you kids was in bed,” she said as she trudged past us.

Apart from Grandma herself, I was the only one who’d seen her big old snaggletoothed tomcat streak out of the coffin and over the windowsill when she let fire. And I supposed she’d seen him climb in, which gave her ideas. It was the cat, sitting smug on Shotgun Cheatham’s breathless chest, who’d batted at the gauze the way a cat will. And he sure lit out the way he’d come when Grandma fired just over his ragged ears, as he’d probably used up eight lives already.

The cat in the coffin gave Grandma Dowdel her chance. She didn’t seem to have any time for Effie Wilcox, whose tongue flapped at both ends, but she had even less for newspaper reporters who think your business is theirs. Courtesy of the cat, she’d fired a round, so to speak, in the direction of each.

Though she didn’t gloat, she looked satisfied. It certainly fleshed out her reputation and gave people new reason to leave her in peace. The story of Shotgun Cheatham’s last night above ground kept The Coffee Pot Cafe fully engaged for the rest of our visit that summer. It was a story that grew in the telling in one of those little towns where there’s always time to ponder all the different kinds of truth.

RICHARD PECK has written more than thirty novels, and in the process has become one of America’s most highly respected writers for the young. A versatile author, he is beloved by middle graders as well as young adults for his mysteries and coming-of-age novels. He lives in New York City and spends a great deal of time traveling around the country to speaking engagements at conferences, schools, and libraries.

Mr. Peck is the first children’s book author to have received a National Humanities Medal. In addition, he has won a number of other major awards for the body of his work, including the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and the Medallion from the University of Southern Mississippi. Virtually every publication and association in the field of children’s literature has recommended his books, including Mystery Writers of America, which twice gave him their Edgar Award. His
A Year Down Yonder
won a Newbery Medal, and
A Long Way from Chicago
was a National Book Award Finalist and a Newbery Honor Book.
A Season of Gifts
is his newest novel starring the incomparable Grandma Dowdel.

What happens when Joey and his sister, Mary Alice—two city slickers from Chicago—make their annual summer visits to Grandma Dowdel’s seemingly sleepy Illinois town?

August 1929: They see their first corpse, and he isn’t resting easy.

August 1930: The Cowgill boys terrorize the town, and Grandma fights back.

August 1931: Joey and Mary Alice help Grandma trespass, poach, catch the sheriff in his underwear, and feed the hungry—all in one day.

And there’s more, as Joey and Mary Alice make seven unforgettable summer trips to Grandma’s—each one funnier than the year before. Now an old man, Joe Dowdel remembers these seven summers and the “larger than life” woman who outsmarted the law and used blackmail to help those in need.

And when Mary Alice turns fifteen, she faces a whole long year living with Grandma while her parents rebuild their lives after the tough times of the Great Depression. All Mary Alice can know for certain is this: When trying to predict how life with Grandma might turn out . . . better not.

In the tradition of American humorists from Mark Twain to Flannery O’Connor, award-winning author Richard Peck creates a memorable world filled with characters who, like Grandma herself, are larger than life and twice as entertaining.

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