A Year Down Yonder (8 page)

Just when the Burdicks had managed to spirit an unwanted baby into the manger, we couldn’t imagine. And why they thought the whole town wouldn’t know another Burdick when they saw one, nobody could say. Grandma pointed out that the Burdicks weren’t broke out with brains. The general view was that the United Brethren orphanage could find the baby a better home.

The evening lay in ruins on the stable straw at our feet. But there was one more miracle. I looked up at the tall man behind Grandma, and it was Joey.

Taller and leaner and handsomer. But Joey—changed and the same. And so I was looking my Christmas in the face. I hugged the wind out of him, tangled him in my sheets, nicked his chin with my halo.

It was Joey, fresh from the west, off the evening train. Grandma had sent him the ticket. That’s where most of the fox money went. That’s what it was for.

I had to turn away, quick. There was a lump in my throat, and that would mean tears on my face, and I didn’t want Joey to see them. Then with a rush of wings, two angels lit on either side of me. The gawky one was Gertrude Messerschmidt. The dumpy one was Irene Stemple.

“Is that your
brother,
Mary Alice?” wondered Gertrude, suddenly my new best friend.

“Oh, Mary Alice, honey, he looks just like Tyrone Power,” Irene breathed, feathering out. “But taller.” Her pudgy small hand found mine in the drapings and she clung to me.

After we got home that night, Grandma showed me another ticket. It was a round-trip to Chicago for me, so I could go on with Joey to have some Christmas with Mother and Dad. It must have cost Grandma her last skin. First, though, we’d keep Christmas right here around the spindly tree in the warm front room. Just the three of us, like the old summer visits. Grandma and Joey and me.

But what I remember best about that evening is the three of us walking home from church. I see us yet, strolling the occasional sidewalks with our arms around Grandma, just to keep her from skidding, because she said she was like a hog on ice. And every star above us was a Christmas star.

After several weeks of hard winter, this end
of the county is enjoying a January thaw. Mrs.
Dowdel, a lifelong resident, observes that “A
January fog will kill a hog.”

—“Newsy Notes from Our Communities” The
Piatt County Call

 

W
e’d just finished up a Saturday breakfast when we heard a pecking of sharp heels out on the back porch. Grandma looked up. A shape showed in the steamy window of the back door. There came a fumbled knocking.

“Better let her in,” Grandma said.

It was Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife. Fools rush in, and she plunged past me into the kitchen.

Grandma looked her up and down. Mrs. Weidenbach’s hat spilled black artificial cherries off the brim. Her upper arm clamped a big pocketbook, and her coat featured a stand-up muskrat collar. Grandma considered the fur with a professional eye. Her gaze fell to Mrs. Weidenbach’s hemline, though she had to peer around the table to see. This may have been when Grandma saw that skirts were getting shorter.

Mrs. Weidenbach showed a good deal of leg. “I won’t keep you, Mrs. Dowdel,” she sang out, “as I see you are a busy woman.”

Having polished off a plate of scrapple and corn syrup, Grandma lolled. “I will cut the cackle,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, “and come straight to the point.”

Mrs. Weidenbach never came straight to the point. Her voice dropped. “Word will have reached you about poor Mrs. Vottsmeier over at Bement.”

“Will it?” Grandma said.

Mrs. Weidenbach clutched a chair back and leaned nearer. “The Change,” she said.

“If she’s thinkin’ about making a change, who could blame her?” said Grandma. “Vottsmeier’s no prize.”

Mrs. Weidenbach rested her eyes. “I mean the Change of Life.” She tried not to notice me nearby.

“Hitting her hard, is it?” Grandma inquired without interest.

Mrs. Weidenbach clutched her own furry bosom and reeled. “The night sweats! The hot flashes! Of course it’s nothing to what I suffered, but ...”

Still, I wouldn’t go away. I was just off her elbow, hearing every forbidden word. And she was coming to the best part. Her voice fell. “And her womb dropped.”

“Do tell,” Grandma said. “How far?”

“She says it
feels
like it hit the floor.” Mrs. Weidenbach gave me a cold shoulder because I was sticking like Grandma’s glue. “But as you know, I never gossip.”

Grandma lurched in surprise. Coffee jumped out of her cup.

“All I am saying is Mrs. Vottsmeier is out of the running.”

A dreadful vision of Mrs. Vottsmeier trying to run with some of her insides bouncing on the floor almost sent
me
reeling.

“And so we are up a gum stump about our Washington’s Birthday tea. It’s our sacred tradition to serve cherry tarts to honor General Washington. And as the world knows, there is nobody to touch Mrs. Vottsmeier for her cherry tarts.” Mrs. Weidenbach’s eyes snapped. “She is a plain woman, but there is poetry in her pastry.”

“Who’s throwing the party?” Grandma said.

“Who?” Mrs. Weidenbach blinked. “Why, the DAR, of course. The Daughters of the American Revolution, of which I have the honor to be president.”

The DAR was a club of only the best ladies in town. They all traced their families back to the Revolutionary War (our side).

“As I expect you are aware,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, warming up, “my family descends from Captain Crow, who was at Yorktown when Cornwallis capitulated. My mother was a Crow, you know.”

“Ah,” Grandma muttered. “That explains it.”

“Frankly, Mrs. Dowdel, one of the sorrows of my marriage is that I don’t have a daughter and, yes, a granddaughter who will step into my DAR shoes when the time comes.”

I couldn’t help it. I looked down at her shoes. They were high-heeled and a size too small.

Mrs. Weidenbach looked at me bleakly. After all, she had no granddaughter, and Grandma had me. Now she began her retreat because the January thaw hadn’t thawed Grandma.

“I leave you with this thought, Mrs. Dowdel. The Daughters of the American Revolution maintain a proud tradition of American aristocracy in even as humble a town as our own. Without cherry tarts, we are letting down General Washington. The town is still abuzz about your pumpkin and pecan pies. And I bow to nobody in my admiration for your flaky pastry. I charge you, Mrs. Dowdel, to play your part and come through for us.”

With that, she was gone. We listened to her pecking off the porch. Silence fell like a benediction.

Grandma took her sweet time, then remarked, “Skimpy coat, wasn’t it? She’s courting pneumonia going around naked to the knee. She wasn’t wearing enough to pad a crutch.”

We sat at the table, listening to the icicles drip from the eaves.

Finally, I said, “Grandma, are we going to be making cherry tarts for her?” Because we’d need cornstarch, and we were about out of lard.

But she didn’t hear me. “There’s different kinds of people in the world,” she said. “There’s them who’ll invite you to join their bunch. Then there’s them who’ll pay you for your work. Then there’s Wilhelmina Weidenbach.”

And that seemed to be her final word on the subject.

“What’s all this about a valentine exchange?” Carleen Lovejoy said to Irene Stemple one February morning. “Nobody told me about it.”

“Newsy Notes” may have been optimistic. There were a lot more girls than boys in school. And none of the boys seemed to be of a romantic nature.

Ina-Rae leaned over from her desk and pushed her big-eyed little face into mine. Somehow she still looked scrawny and incomplete without her wings. “It says in the paper there’s going to be a valentine exchange,” she whispered. “At the grade school we always made our valentines. We cut out hearts at our desks and put on lace. Elmo Leaper ate the paste. It was fun. Do you reckon we’ll make them here?”

“I doubt it,” I whispered back. “This is high school.”

“Well, it beats what we’re doing.” Ina-Rae stuck out her tongue at her history book.

The classroom door opened. Principal Fluke stood there with a new boy. The day had been gray, but crisp winter sun broke through and seemed to find the newcomer. He was as tall as Mr. Fluke and lots better-looking. His hair was red-gold, according to the sun, and not cut at home. It was razor-trimmed over ears flat to his head. Forrest Pugh, Jr.’s, ears stood straight out, like open car doors.

“Miss Butler,” Mr. Fluke said. “I got you a new scholar. Looks like my prayers is answered, and I got me a scoring center for my basketball team.” Mr. Fluke pointed to the top of the boy’s head.

Milton Grider flipped his pencil and slumped in his desk. At five nine, he’d been the tallest boy in school, till now. The new boy seemed to be six feet tall, easy. The back of Carleen Lovejoy’s head vibrated.

“Name of Royce McNabb,” Mr. Fluke said. “His paw’s come in as surveyor for the county roads. Family’s from down Coles County way. Mattoon. Let’s call him a senior.”

If Royce McNabb minded hearing his personal history blurted out in front of strangers, he didn’t let on. But then, he was from Mattoon, which was citified for these parts. And sure enough, he was wearing corduroy pants, not overalls. An argyle pattern sweater strained across his broad shoulders.

Ahead of me, Carleen gripped herself. “Be still, my heart,” she murmured loudly. Then she leaned across to Irene Stemple and said, “Hands off. He’s mine.”

“Move over, Milton,” Miss Butler said, “and make Royce welcome.”

Royce went through the day with the same smile for everybody. He’d probably been in a lot of schools and knew how to handle himself.

When I got home, I told Grandma we had a new boy at school. She waved him away. “The town’s filling up with people you wouldn’t know from Adam’s off ox. Not like the old days when you knew your neighbors.”

“The winters were colder back then too, weren’t they, Grandma?”

“People starved to death because their jaws froze shut,” she said. “You getting interested in boys?”

“Who, me?” I said.

At that, we heard Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach fumbling at the back door. When I let her in, there were ice crystals in her muskrat. She elbowed past me, her eyes teary with cold and emotion. Grandma had been over by the Hoosier cabinet. Now she was sitting down, seemingly at her ease.

“Mrs. Dowdel, we cannot pussyfoot anymore over these cherry tarts.” Mrs. Weidenbach grappled with her giant purse and came up with the
Piatt County Call
newspaper. “I need a commitment. My land, it’s in the paper now, where it has inspired two lines of bad verse.”

Grandma didn’t read the paper, so Mrs. Weidenbach shook it open and read,

“Doesn’t that turn your stomach?” she demanded. “I don’t call it reporting, and I don’t call it poetry. It’s snooping, and possibly by a foreign power. The dignity of the DAR is on the line.”

Grandma picked a loose thread from her apron front.

“Mrs. Dowdel, I need your answer before we get any more publicity of this sort.”

“Oh well.” Grandma turned over a large hand on oilcloth. “If it’s my patriotic duty, I’ll bake up a mess of tarts.”

The wind went out of Mrs. Weidenbach. She’d been geared up for a larger struggle, more on the lines of the Battle of Bunker Hill. “You will? Well, that’s real ... reasonable of you.”

“All in a good cause,” Grandma said.

Mrs. Weidenbach turned to go, but didn’t make it to the door.

“On my terms,” Grandma said.

Mrs. Weidenbach turned back, slowly.

“We’ll have your DAR tea right here at my house.”

“But—”

“It’ll be handier for me,” Grandma said. “I don’t get out much anymore.”

That was a whopper, but Mrs. Weidenbach’s head was whirling.

“Mrs. Dowdel, let me explain. This is more than a social occasion. This is a meeting of our DAR chapter, strictly limited to our members. It is always at my house.”

“I’ll fire up the stove in my front room,” Grandma said. “It’ll be warm as toast in there.”

“But—”

“Or you can serve store-bought cupcakes at your place.”

Mrs. Weidenbach crumbled.

 

I was at school early on Valentine’s Day, but Miss Butler was there before me. Since the newspaper had announced a valentine exchange, she thought she’d better fill in with a valentine of her own on everybody’s desk. Hers were the flimsy kind that came in a sheet you punched out. So that was one valentine apiece.

When people straggled in, they found their valentines. “Honestly,” Carleen Lovejoy said, rolling her eyes when she saw her valentine was from Miss Butler. She stuffed it into her desk.

Then here came Ina-Rae. On her desk beside mine was Miss Butler’s valentine—and three more. Ina-Rae clasped both hands over her mouth. She squeaked, and people turned to look. She was all eyes. And she really was the thinnest girl in the world. She was skinnier than a toothpick with termites. She looked around to see how many valentines everybody else got. One apiece.

Ina-Rae crept into her desk. Her hands dithered over the paper pile. She too made short work of Miss Butler’s valentine. Then she took up the next one. It was homemade to a fault. It looked like it had been whittled, not cut out. The message read, Ina-Rae stared, then leaned so far over, she was almost in my lap. “I think that one’s from Elmo Leaper,” she confided at the top of her voice. “Can you believe it?”