A Long Way From Chicago (5 page)

Later, much later, we heard something. The snowball bushes outside the window swayed gently. I barely saw Grandma’s hand come up to stroke her cheek. We didn’t breathe for listening.

Then footsteps on the back porch—creeping, then more confident. After all, nobody was home. A hand closed over the knob on the screen door to the kitchen, and found it latched.

We heard a little sawing, singing sound as a file began to slice through screen wire. From the settee Mary Alice made some tiny, terrified sound. Grandma reached down
for something in her sewing basket. The darkness made me see pinwheels like sparklers. I just managed to notice Grandma’s rocker was rocking and she wasn’t in it. She was standing over me. “Keep just behind me,” she whispered.

I followed her across the room to the kitchen. You wouldn’t believe a woman that heavy could be so light on her feet. She floated, and we moved like some strange beast, big in front, small behind. Now we were by the door to the kitchen, and I heard the scuffle of heavy feet in there on the crinkly linoleum.

Grandma turned back to me. Under my nose she struck a wooden match with her thumbnail. Men strike a match one-handed, but you never see a woman doing that. She hid the flare of the flame with herself and touched the match to something in her other hand. It sizzled. Then she leaned down and rolled it into the invisible kitchen.

Seconds passed. Then once more, Grandma’s house erupted in sound and light. Blue lightning flashed in the kitchen, and for a split second you could see every calendar on the wall in there. Then an almighty explosion like the crack of doom. She’d rolled a cherry bomb across the floor, and it went off right under the eight feet of the Cowgill brothers, the three big bruisers and Ernie.

Grandma shoved me past her into the kitchen. “Pull the chain on the ceiling light,” she said, and I did. When I turned back to her, Grandpa Dowdel’s shotgun was wedged into her shoulder. I dodged out of her way, and there stood all four Cowgill brothers. They were deaf as posts and too scared to move, even before they realized
they were looking down both barrels of the gun they’d come to steal.

All of them wore manure-caked steel-toed boots, so that had saved their toes from being blown off. But a singed smell came from their pants. The cherry bomb had scared them witless, except for Ernie, who was witless anyway. But he was the only one who could speak. “I’m dead,” he said. “I’m dead. Oh yes, I’m dead.”

“Skin to the church and get their maw and paw,” Grandma said briefly to me.

“Which church?”

“Holy Rollers,” she said. “By the lumberyard. And step on it. I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.”

“I’m dead,” Ernie said.

I raced like the wind through the nighttime town. I sprinted past the business block and across the tracks by the depot toward the lumberyard. Then I began to hear singing with a ragtime beat, accompanied by tambourines:

The church was no bigger than a one-room schoolhouse, but it seemed to be packed to the rafters. The rail outside was thick with horses hitched to wagons. One of the wagons was from Cowgills’ Dairy Farm.

Light and song were pouring out of the open doorway. I stood in it, remembering I didn’t know what the
Cowgills’ maw and paw looked like. Besides, all I could see were the backs of peoples’ heads. Then I got lucky. Mrs. Effie Wilcox sat at the end of a pew. I knew her from her hat. Her hands were high above her head, swaying in the air, and she was singing with the rest:

I sidled down the side aisle, breathing heavy. Every minute counted, and I didn’t know how long this hymn might last. It sounded like it could have a lot of verses.

I tapped Mrs. Wilcox on the shoulder. She jerked around. “It’s a miracle,” she hollered out. “The first Dowdel ever seen in the House of the Lord! Hallelujah, one more sinner gathered in!”

“Listen, Mrs. Wilcox,” I said, urgent in her ear. “Where are the Cowgills? It’s kind of important.”

“The Cowgills?” she said. “Why, they’re right here next to me. Where else would they be? They been saved, and now you—”

“Listen, Mrs. Wilcox. Grandma blew up all four of their
boys with a cherry bomb. Now she’s got them pinned down with the shotgun.”

Mrs. Wilcox’s mouth opened in a silent scream.

Then all four of us, Mr. and Mrs. Cowgill, Mrs. Wilcox, and me, were in the swaying milk wagon behind the galloping horse. There aren’t any seats in a milk wagon, so we clung to the sides and each other. For somebody too nervous to live, Mrs. Wilcox stood the trip pretty well.

The wagon bounced across Grandma’s side yard. Now we were all tumbling down and racing each other to the back door. To keep up, both ladies held their skirts high. We burst into the kitchen, and it seemed that nobody had moved a muscle in there. The butt of the shotgun was still buried in Grandma’s shoulder, and she was squinting down the barrels. The Cowgill boys looked like they were on the chain gang already.

I got my first real look at their maw and paw. She was kind of a faded lady, and he had a milder look than his bruiser boys. They were all a lot taller than he was.

“Now, now,” Mr. Cowgill said, “what have we here?”

“What we have here,” Grandma said, “is breaking-and-entering. Burglary and pilfering. Reform school for the youngest one, the penitentiary for the overgrown ones. Unless my trigger finger gives way to temptation. They wanted this shotgun, and they’re liable to get it, right between the eyes.”

The ceiling light glinted wickedly off her spectacles. “And they tore down Effie Wilcox’s specialty house. Tell it, Effie. You knew at the time who the culprits was who
kicked your privy to kingdom come.”

Mrs. Wilcox whimpered.

“Now, now, Mrs. Dowdel,” Mr. Cowgill said. “This is nothing more than a misunderstanding. My boys aren’t broke out with brains, you know. I have an idea they just wandered into the wrong house.”

“Oh, they wandered into the wrong house all right,” Grandma said. “And they’d already blowed up the wrong mailbox.”

“Mrs. Dowdel, Mrs. Dowdel, compose your soul in patience,” Mr. Cowgill said. “And put up that shotgun. It don’t look ladylike.”

I was tempted to cover my ears, because that alone was enough to make Grandma squeeze off a round. “You know yourself, Mrs. Dowdel, boys will be boys. They’s high-spirited. They’ll settle down in time and all be good Christian men. Their maw and I have set them a good example.”

I thought Mr. Cowgill was going way out on a limb. But strangely, Grandma lowered the shotgun. “Well, you know best, being their paw,” she said calmly. She stood the shotgun against the wall and folded her arms before her. “But get them out of my kitchen, and you owe me for the screen wire they cut to get in. And I’ll want me a new mailbox. A good galvanized iron one, even if it runs you three dollars.”

Mr. Cowgill paled at that, but said, “There now. I knew you’d see sense, Mrs. Dowdel. Boys go through these phases. Come along, boys.” He patted his biggest bruiser’s shoulder, and all four of them were trying hard not to smirk. Mrs. Cowgill left first, supported by Mrs.
Wilcox. Then the bruisers and Ernie trooped out. Their paw was just at the door when Grandma said, “Not so fast, Cowgill.”

He turned, unwilling, back.

“I’ll be interested in your explanation for that.” She pointed to the milk bottle that nobody had noticed, though it stood on the kitchen table.

The milk in it was more pink than white now. But you could see the mouse inside. In fact, it had swelled up some.

“What the—”

“You can say that again,” Grandma remarked.

Sweat popped out on Mr. Cowgill’s brow. “Mrs. Dowdel, you don’t mean to tell me—”

“I don’t mean to tell you a thing. There stands the evidence.”

“Mrs. Dowdel, it can’t be. We’re strictly sanitary. We strain our milk.” Sweat ran in rivers off his pate.

“I don’t doubt it,” she said. “After all, you’ve got to keep your good name in a town like this.”

“Then how—”

“A bunch of worthless boys who’d ransack the town every night is apt to drop a mouse in the milk just before delivering to my door. Your big ones is perfectly capable of putting Ernie up to it. He’s simple. After all, they blew up my mailbox, and Effie Wilcox has to use my privy. Thugs like yours who prey on two old helpless widow women such as Effie and myself is liable to get up to anything. Many more mice in the milk, and your customers will start keeping their own cows again.”

Mr. Cowgill shrank. His dry mouth worked wordlessly, and there was fear in his eyes, naked fear. He didn’t mind what his boys did to the town, but now he saw his business going down the drain, so to speak.

“Mrs. Dowdel,” he said in a broken voice. “What do you want?”

“Justice,” Grandma said.

A pause fell upon them. Grandma and Mr. Cowgill seemed to have a moment of complete understanding.

Then he said, “What’ll I use?”

She nodded across the kitchen to the sink. In his earthly life Grandpa Dowdel had shaved over that sink. The mirror still hung there from his time, and beside it a long leather strop for sharpening the edge on his cutthroat razor.

Mr. Cowgill edged around the kitchen table and pulled the strop off the wall. Then he left. Grandma and I filled the doorway to watch.

It was dark out there, but you could see the lumpish shapes of the Cowgill boys hanging around the milk wagon, waiting for their paw. They didn’t have to wait a minute more.

“Line up according to age,” he called out, snapping the long leather strop above his head. Then he whaled the tar out of every one of them. They squealed like stuck hogs while Mrs. Cowgill lamented from the milk wagon. He took each by the arm in turn and gave them all what for. You could tell when he got to Ernie because a wavering voice cried out, “I’m dead.”

At last the milk wagon clattered out of the yard. Grandma stayed at the door as peace descended. The snap
of the strop against bruiser britches seem to linger in the night air. Mary Alice joined us. She’d made herself scarce once she’d seen Grandma grab up the shotgun. She was a little older now, a little wiser.

Then back up the path came Mrs. Wilcox. You could see the shape of her hat bobbing against the dark. She’d been making a call at our privy on her way home.

“Night now,” she called out, crossing the yard.

“Night, Effie,” Grandma called back to her worst enemy.

Then she turned from the door, and I saw the look on her face. You had to study hard to see any expression at all, but it was a look I was coming to know. She appeared pretty satisfied at the way things had turned out. And she’d returned law and order to the town she claimed she didn’t give two hoots about.