A Year Down Yonder (6 page)

It was time to leave. She couldn’t hide her coffee cans as long as we were there. But Grandma said, “How is he?”

Mrs. Abernathy looked aside, into the shadows. “He don’t change much. Will you step up to see him? He won’t know. But we don’t get company, and it’s quiet after the turkey shoot.”

Mrs. Abernathy took notice of me for the first time. “I don’t know if you want the girl to—”

“She can take it,” Grandma said.

So I knew that whatever it was, I’d have to.

 

I followed behind them up the stairs, numb with not knowing. It was so low-ceilinged up there that Grandma had to duck. Mrs. Abernathy pushed open a door, and I smelled ointment and a sickroom.

It was under the slant of the roof. A wheelchair, an old-time one with three wheels and a wicker back, stood by the dormer window. He was sitting in it. Mrs. Abernathy’s son.

She’d tied him into the chair with flannel strips, and his head was fallen back. His face was slick and raw, and his jaw hung open. He was far thinner than his mother, and his arms hung useless down the sides of the chair. When Mrs. Abernathy touched his shoulder, he turned toward her. Then you could tell he was blind. He turned his head away.

Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. Grandma and Mrs. Abernathy stood together for a minute—a minute like the morning. Then we left.

We went in a hurry past the coffee cans on the kitchen table because Grandma didn’t want thanks. Outside, I was surprised it was still daylight, surprised the world was still there.

The turkey shoot was over and the crowds gone. Down in the barn lot Mrs. W. T. Sheets sat in the big Buick, up on a jack. Mr. Sheets hunkered by the back fender. He was having trouble changing the wheel, and his spare looked low. The air was blue around him.

Grandma and I turned out of the gate and along the road, back to town. She set her mouth against the wind. It had turned, so we were walking into it again. And there was some winter in the wind. She tramped along, listening so intently to the quiet that I said, “Grandma, tell me.”

“Her boy was gassed in the trenches,” Grandma said. “And shot up.”

We went on, the town rising on the horizon.

“He gets a check from the government, but it don’t keep them.”

“But, Grandma, aren’t there veterans’ hospitals where he could go?”

“She won’t give him up,” Grandma said. “She’s lost him once already.”

We walked a narrow stretch between the road and the ditch, single file. Then just above the sighing wind she said, “The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.”

Then I could read her thoughts and I knew what this day meant. Mrs. Abernathy’s son could have been my dad.

It was farther coming back than going. Counting fence posts made it longer. Finally we were in town, walking under bare branches. Grandma was putting the day behind her. You could see it in her stride. We turned at the business block, past Weidenbach’s bank.

Something brought Grandma up short in front of Moore’s Store. Under the turkey shoot posters was a display of Sweetheart soap. She stopped dead, though she made her own soap. Beside the display was a big picture of Kate Smith, the Songbird of the South, hand-colored. She leaned out of the frame, smiling broadly. In her hand was a cake of soap. Below was her testimonial:

Grandma looked closer. “Looky there,” she said. “That’s Kate Smith. Do you suppose that’s a good picture of her? I hadn’t any idea she was such a big, full-figured woman.”

Kate Smith was a very big, very full-figured woman. She was as big as—Grandma.

Grandma gazed at her picture with approval. Then on she walked with almost a spring in her step, though she was wearing boots.

By and by, I heard her humming. She wasn’t a musical woman, so it took me a block and a half to recognize the tune. It was “When the moon comes over the mountain, every beam brings a dream, dear, of you.”

C
hristmas was in the air, and Miss Butler had us girls making gifts in Home Ec. class. We ought to have been learning invisible mending and turning hems to make our clothes last. But Miss Butler decreed hot pads for our loved ones, made by crocheting used bottle caps into circular patterns.

Ina-Rae was my crocheting partner, and she was all thumbs with a crochet hook. Her hot pad bunched up in the middle like a skullcap. She wore it on her head until Miss Butler told her to take it off. I couldn’t picture giving Grandma a hot pad made out of bottle caps crocheted together, so I let Ina-Rae have mine for her mother. I hadn’t thought about giving Grandma anything. Somehow I didn’t think Grandma and Christmas went together.

I was lucky to have Ina-Rae though. Carleen Lovejoy was still looking straight through me, and she set the tone for the rest of the girls. I hadn’t made a lot of headway in all these weeks. Ina-Rae heard Gertrude Messerschmidt tell Mona Veech that I wasn’t as pushy as they thought I’d be. But that was as far as I’d got.

If there was one point in my favor, it was that I wasn’t as well dressed as they’d feared. I had two wool skirts. One had been Mother’s. The other belonged mostly to the moths. With my three sweaters, I could get through the week. But I was hurting for shoes, and my winter coat was a disgrace.

Carleen had five different outfits top to toe for every day in the week. She always wore silk stockings on Fridays, though some of her shoes may have been her mother’s. Her sweater with drawstring neckline and pom-poms was much admired. But as Carleen said in her airy way, considering the boys in our school, there wasn’t much point in looking your best.

But now Christmas was coming, and the annual school Christmas program, so we all had to pull together. The entire student body was to be the chorus, though half of us couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles. When Miss Butler ran us through “Angels We Have Heard on High,” we sounded like starlings in a tree.

There was to be a Nativity scene, and she assigned us parts. Joseph, the three kings, and some shepherds just about exhausted the supply of boys. Nobody wanted Augie Fluke on the stage. His hair was growing out, but he looked like a plucked chicken.

The girls’ parts were for Baby Jesus’ Mother and a heavenly host of angels. The idea that a boy could be an angel never occurred to Miss Butler.

The school was rocked by the news that I was to play Baby Jesus’ Mother. I was surprised myself. Someone was heard to remark, “What was Miss Butler dreaming of? A
Chicago
girl playing the Virgin Mary. The idea!” It was Carleen. As we had to come up with our own costumes, I thought I could get by with bedsheets.

The program was all the Christmas some of us would have. Money was tighter than last year. The two topics on everybody’s mind there at the end of 1937 were something to eat and money. Not that I ever went hungry at Grandma’s. But there was hunger around. And with Grandma, money remained a mystery.

I made my way home from school one early December day, scooping snow with my open-toed shoes. Strangely, Grandma wasn’t home. Just at dusk when I was up in my room, still wearing my old plaid coat, something drew me to the window.

Coming up the road by the Wabash tracks was a fearful figure. A lumbering, humped shape bent into the swirling snow. Its head was swathed in something. Strapped to its back was a long wicker basket. Its boots left black footprints behind. I hugged my skimpy coat tight and felt the empty house around me. The figure was at our fence line when it looked up at my window, and me.

It was Grandma.

I was down in the kitchen as she came in, shaggy with snow. She slung the big basket aside. Then she untred the shawl that held her hat on. She flung Grand Dowdel’s old coat at a chair before the fire.

Underneath, she was wearing Grandpa’s rubber chest-waders that were like rubber bib overalls. They strained across her bosom and pulled at the shoulder straps. She was all in black rubber almost up to her chins.

Of all the figures she ever cut, this one took the cake. I often wondered what she’d buried Grandpa Dowdel in. She seemed to wear every stitch he’d owned.

“Chilly out there.” She rubbed her big red hands together. “My teeth is chattering like a woodpecker with palsy.”

“Grandma, why were you out tramping the countryside in this weather?”

“First snow,” she explained. “It’s my busy season. It’s all work, work, work. I’ll die standing up like an old ox.”

What good would it do me to question her more? I peered into the tall wicker basket. It was half full of shells—walnut hulls. They didn’t tell me a thing.

I’ll omit the scene of Grandma fighting her way out of all that rubber, beside the heat of the stove. It was like shedding a skin. Below it, she wore two crumpled housedresses and a cardigan sweater. Under that, a quick peek of long-handled flannel underwear—a union suit, Grandpa’s.

At the supper table I mentioned that Miss Butler had picked the parts for the Christmas program. I confided that I was Baby Jesus’ Mother.

“They still doing Nativity scenes?” Grandma said. “We done them when I was a country girl in a one-room schoolhouse. ”

“What part did they give you?”

“Joseph,” she said. “And once, a camel. I was always the biggest.”

After I’d dried the dishes, I opened up my homework. They had homework down here too, sadly. Miss Butler could really dole it out. Mr. Herkimer was no slouch. Grandma sat at the other end of the table, nodding, while I tried to diagram some sentences.

I moved on to biology, falling into the rhythm of Grandma’s snore. A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.

“Is that the time?” She pointed down the table at me. “You better get booted and bundled up.” She was not of the chair, shaking down the stove. Now she reached for her hat and the shawl and felt Grandpa’s coat to see if it was dry.

I clutched my forehead. “Grandma, it’s the dead of night.”

“But a moonlit night.” She shimmied into her chest-waders and stuffed her skirttails inside.

“Grandma, it’s a school night. I need my sleep.”

“Sleep? You’ll sleep your life away and rot in the bed. You better pull on two pair of socks under your galoshes.”

I had galoshes, but hated wearing them. “Grandma, where are we going?”

“After a character who’s smarter than we are,” she said, struggling into the coat, clenching her jaw.

When I came back to the kitchen, layered like Admiral Byrd, Grandma was rummaging through the mysterious wicker basket. She took inventory of various things buried in the walnut hulls. A coil of her picture wire. A handful of wooden stakes. She drew forth a small glass vial of some amber liquid. With a sly look my way, she uncorked it and passed it under my nose.

I reeled back. “Grandma, that smells nasty.”

“Depends on who’s doing the smelling.” She rummaged on, coming up with what looked like a rabbit’s foot. It was something furry off a rabbit.

“What’s that for, Grandma? Good luck?”

“You might say so.”

She stood to hoist the basket onto her shoulder. Then she remembered and made for a knife drawer in the Hoosier cabinet. Out of the drawer she drew a gun.

I froze.

It was nothing like the blunderbuss behind the woodbox. It was, in fact, a single-shot .22 pistol. But I didn’t know that then. There was a lot I didn’t know. Slipping the pistol into her pocket, she marched us both out the door, into the night.

We trod the icy ridges of the road, and the town fell back behind us. A cold, cloudless moon glared on white fields. I walked in Grandma’s shadow, hearing the basket thump her back and the walnut hulls dance to her step. Of course, I should be sound asleep in bed by now, and I couldn’t feel my toes. And Grandma was packing a pistol. But it was beautiful out here, like a black and white Christmas card. The ice on the wovenwire fences was a latticework of diamonds. And only Grandma and I were awake in all this stillness, at least I hoped so.

We must have walked halfway to Cowgills’ farm before she nudged me off the road. We jammed a gate against a drift and entered someone’s field. The snow was deeper here. Grandma led the way as we kept to the fences to the far corner of the field.

She put up a hand to hold me back. She wore railroaders’ gloves. Then I heard the scream. A scream too human, from down in the dipping corner of the field that the moon missed. An answering scream froze in my throat.

Grandma shrugged out of the basket and whipped the pistol from her pocket. A moonbeam glanced the black metal of the narrow barrel as she aimed into the dark corner where two fences met. She fired straight into the scream. My knees begged to buckle.

She was down on all fours now, the black coat fanning out in the snow, her hands busy. She worked intently, biting off one glove to use her bare hand to do whatever she was doing. She tugged at a wire, and powdery snow shook loose off a fence post. Metal clicked. Then she pulled back and held him up, by the neck.

It was a fox—red, though black in the moonlight. His head lolled against her fist. His eyes were black beads. But he was dead, drilled through the head to put him out of his misery. A slender stem seemed to connect his hanging mouth to the snow. But that was a thin trickle of blood. I fought the supper in my throat.

Grandma dropped the fox in the snow and reached for the jawed spring trap that had caught it—a Victor #2, as I would come to know. She pulled herself to her feet to toss the trap into the basket. The walnut hulls were to disguise a human scent. So were the rubber chest-waders. Oh, I had lots to learn, once I was over the first shock.

Replacing her glove, she plunged her whole arm into the basket and came up with another trap. She fished for the tuft of rabbit fur and the vial of amber liquid and the picture wire.