A Season of Gifts (8 page)

“Feathers,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “That’s right. Mrs. Dowdel’s fixin’ to get down to the end of her rope. And you don’t want to rile her. She’s about a squat jump away from—”

“I’ll tell it, Effie,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “I’m up to here with juvenile delinquent sorority gals and riffraff from out of town trampin’ my property like they own it. This used to be a nice quiet little town. Now look at it.”

“Just look,” Mrs. Wilcox said.

“Ah,” Dad said.

“So I dug her up,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “That so-called Kickapoo Princess, and here she is.”

She handed the box over, and it was in Dad’s hands before he knew it. We stood there stunned. Mother went snow
white. Phyllis just went. Ruth Ann was all eyes. She poked at the bridge of her nose like she was wearing spectacles.

“This is all I could find of her, and it’s not much more than eye-teeth and gristle. But then, she’d been pushing up my melons for a good many years,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “She wasn’t nothin’ but a bag of bones even before I was born. And I’m old as dirt.”

“Older,” Mrs. Wilcox murmured.

“I want a good church funeral for her so the public will know she’s not adrift around the back of my place. And I want her buried out in the cemetery along with everybody else.”

She was turning to go now and shooing Mrs. Wilcox to the door. “Do your best, Preacher,” she said over her massive shoulder. “And do it up big. I’ll get the word out. You get the lead out.”

Then they were gone.

“Night now!” Mrs. Wilcox called back out of the evening. Dad stood there with all that remained of the Kickapoo Princess.

“I’m not a showman, Ellen,” he said at last to Mother. “I’m no Gypsy Piggott. It sounds like they won’t want a funeral. They’ll want a show.”

“You’ll know what to do, Jack,” Mother said. “You’ll rise to the occasion. This may just be a heaven-sent opportunity for you.”

She looked fairly sure, though it was hard to picture
Mrs. Dowdel as a messenger from heaven. But Mother may already have been thinking about sheet music and a choir. She’d met Dad when she was in the choir and he was in his first pulpit. You could almost hear hymns humming in her head.

Dad jiggled the box. The label on the blanket around it read:

MADE IN THE USA
PENDLETON, OREGON

“I don’t think there’s much of anything in this box,” Dad said. “Or anybody.”

“Maybe she’s there in spirit,” Mother said.

“Or maybe Mrs. Dowdel dreamed her up out of thin air,” Dad said. “I’m not sure the truth is always in her.”

But then they both noticed Ruth Ann right below them, all ears and as innocent as if she’d never worn a feathered headdress in all her six years.

W
e laid the Kickapoo Princess to rest the Saturday before high school homecoming. It was a brilliant fall day with the sumac running riot in the hedgerows. Indian summer, in fact.

In a pinch we could pack forty people into the pews.

By mid-morning upward of two hundred people were standing outside. A press tent rose in the park. WGN from Chicago was broadcasting on live radio what they called The Final Rites of the Piatt County Pocahontas.

Mother was already at church. She’d called for a choir practice on Wednesday night, and eighty people turned out, though she could only field fourteen. Now people from Casner to Lovington remembered they were Methodists and came in waves. You wouldn’t have been surprised
to see them marching across the fields, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

As the clock ticked toward two, Dad and I stood on our porch. His hand was on my shoulder, which I liked. Cars and trucks were parked past us out to Salt Crick. It was the first time I ever saw Dad wear his robe with the velvet down the front. There was a whiff of mothballs about him, and his upper lip was beady with sweat. This might have been when I first noticed it wasn’t that easy being a grown-up.

“‘I make myself a slave to everyone,’” he remarked, “‘to win as many as possible.’”

“That’s Scripture,” I said to him. “Am I right, Dad?”

“I Corinthians. 9:19,” he said.

“Dad, am I going to have to be a minister when I grow up?”

“If you hear the Call, you’ll have to answer it.”

“Oh,” I said.

But then Dad said, thoughtful and far-off, “Or you may just want to let it ring.”

*  *  *

Now Mrs. Dowdel was coming across her yard. Mrs. Wilcox and Ruth Ann bobbed behind, all aproned, all making for church. A fully feathered pheasant, stuffed, rode the front of Mrs. Dowdel’s hat.

“Right nice day for a funeral,” Mrs. Wilcox called over to us. “God’s smilin’.”

“He may be laughing out loud,” Dad said, under his breath.

Mrs. Dowdel glanced over and seemed to see me for the first time in her life. “That your boy, Preacher?”

“It is,” Dad called back. “And I believe that’s one of my daughters trailing you.”

Ruth Ann waved as onward they trooped, single-file into the gathering crowd.

In the distance the high school band started down the main street from the other way, playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in march time. The glitter on the majorettes’ batons winked in the sun.

Dad squeezed my shoulder, here in this last moment.

I’d already been down to the church an hour before, trying to usher. But people had kept knocking me over to get in the pews. Mrs. Weidenbach had roped off an entire pew for the Daughters of the American Revolution, and she’d brought her own rope.

There were plenty of United Brethren there too, and everybody else. Wash-foot. Sprinklers and dunkers. Even some Amish over from Arthur in buggies. The Shellabarger sisters were sighted, Miss Cora and Miss Flora, and people said that Miss Cora hadn’t been off their porch since before the Korean Police Action.

Dad and I turned up the street through the bright, swirling leaves. Switchy-tailed squirrels peered down from high
branches to the heads below. The Veterans of Foreign Wars were selling pulled pork sandwiches out of a truck bed. The crowds parted, and everybody noticed Dad’s robe. Up the rickety church steps we went, Dad and I.

The Methodist Women’s Circle had placed the princess’s box on a draped table below the pulpit. Around it was an artistic arrangement of fall leaves and asters. People had brought various souvenirs from trips out west on Route 66: clay pottery, sweetgrass baskets, toy totem poles, calabashes, two tomahawks.

Mrs. Dowdel had already elbowed three Daughters of the American Revolution out of the front pew to make room for herself, Mrs. Wilcox, and Ruth Ann.

The color guard of the American Legion pushed in past Dad and me. They were in their spit-and-polish blue with gold braid, bearing two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the State of Illinois.

The high school band members worked in behind them. In fact the whole high school, though I didn’t see Phyllis. There were some notes clenched in Dad’s hand as he started down the aisle. Mother’s choir broke into “Once to Every Man and Nation Comes the Moment to Decide.” All the plastic in the windows had blown out. Gold autumn light poured in, and a few bright leaves.

Dad turned at the front. He didn’t climb up into the pulpit and put himself above the rest of us. As Mother often pointed out, he was modest to a fault.

Behind me a television camera from WSOY rolled in. Dad saw that. He pointed at the camera crew and in a ringing voice said, “Take that thing out of here. This is a place of worship.” The crew fell back, and the congregation stirred. Dad looked somewhat surprised at himself.

There was sudden silence except for the wasps in the eaves.

“‘Open your eyes and look at the fields!’” Dad intoned. “‘They are ripe for harvest.’”

Mrs. Dowdel spoke up from the front pew. “John. 4:35.”

The congregation craned and murmured. They’d never seen her in church.

Dad looked down at the table. Beside the princess’s box was a piece of painted pottery, maybe ancient, probably not.

Dad held it up. “‘We are the clay,’” he said, looking to heaven through the breaks in the roof. “‘You are the potter.’”

“Isaiah. 64:8,” Mrs. Dowdel responded.

“We’re here to remember those who came before us,” Dad said in his regular voice. “The stewards of this land that now we till, the place where we make our homes and build our lives and hold our children in our arms.”

The congregation edged forward. He had a fine voice, Dad did. They could tell he was a thoughtful man, and now they heard his thoughts, about how people, families, had always lived here. How we were links in the chain.

It wasn’t a long sermon, and the congregation stayed with him every word of the way. He hadn’t mentioned the Kickapoo Princess, the Piatt County Pocahontas. Maybe people forgot why they’d come.

But then as he drew to a close, Dad put his hand on the princess’s box, and people stood up at the back, just to see his hand there.

And Dad said,

People stopped fanning themselves with the funeral home fans.

A stillness stirred inside every soul within these rickety walls.

“Amen,” Mrs. Dowdel said into the quiet. “Amen to that.” And from this golden Indian summer day, we had us a church.

W
e buried the princess’s box in among the roots of a sugar maple at the edge of the cemetery. From there she’d have a view across open country to the Sangamon River bottoms.

At the Sunday service next day it took four ushers to pass the plates along the crowded pews. And while rich old Miss Cora and Miss Flora Shellabarger didn’t attend, they sent a fifty-dollar check on the Weidenbach bank for the church roof fund.

School was okay too, more or less. They were letting me live. But even if I hadn’t been a preacher’s kid, all the groups were already set up. Farm kids. Town kids. Then there was me. The farm kids ate at their own picnic table at lunch. But one of them turned out to be a pretty good guy. He was a big old raw-boned country boy named Jess Wood.

He was twice my size, but he seemed to be making his first run at sixth grade. And he didn’t like bullies. One noon he happened to notice that big Newt Fluke was stealing my lunch and passing it to Elmo Leaper, Jr. They were absent a lot, but when they weren’t, I went hungry. I’d already tried grabbing my lunch back from Newt, and I’d got a fat lip out of it. And no lunch.

On this particular noon I was already going for the apple in my desk when Jess Wood climbed off the farmers’ picnic table and ambled over.

“Hand it back, Newt,” he said in Newt Fluke’s face.

“Why would I do a thing like that?” Newt’s voice had changed, probably many semesters ago.

“Because I might have a word with your leader, Roscoe Burdick.”

At mere mention of Roscoe Burdick, Elmo Leaper, Jr., pulled back and jammed his mitts in his bib overalls. Newt was left holding the lunch. “What’s Roscoe Burdick got to do with anything?” said Newt, shifty-eyed.

“This kid is Phyllis Barnhart’s kid brother, you wing nut,” Jess said, like it explained everything.

Newt blinked, and my lunch seemed to grow heavy in his hand. “Who says it’s your business, rube?” he said to Jess, though his voice cracked.

“Jess says,” I piped. My hands were on my hips because now I had backup. I don’t know what came over me. I could have got myself smeared all over the room.