by Richard Peck
“And now he goes to a pauper’s grave with none to mark his passing,” the reporter said, which may have been a sample of his writing style.
“They tell you that?” Grandma said. “They’re pulling your leg, sonny. You drop by The Coffee Pot and tell them you heard that Shotgun’s being buried from my house with full honors. He’ll spend his last night above ground in my front room, and you’re invited.”
The reporter backed down the porch stairs, staggering under all this new material. “Much obliged, ma’am,” he said.
“Happy to help,” Grandma said.
Mary Alice had turned loose of my shirttail. What little we knew about grown-ups didn’t seem to cover Grandma. She turned on us. “Now I’ve got to change my shoes and walk all the way up to the lumberyard in this heat,” she said, as if she hadn’t brought it all on herself. Up at the lumberyard they’d be knocking together Shotgun Cheatham’s coffin and sending the bill to the county, and Grandma had to tell them to bring that coffin to her house, with Shotgun in it.
By nightfall a green pine coffin stood on two sawhorses in the bay window of the front room, and people milled in the yard. They couldn’t see Shotgun from there because the coffin lid blocked the view. Besides, a heavy gauze hung from the open lid and down over the front of the coffin to veil him. Shotgun hadn’t been exactly fresh when they discovered his body. Grandma had flung open every window, but there was a peculiar smell in the room. I’d only had one look at him when they’d carried in the coffin, and that was enough. I’ll tell you just two things about him. He didn’t have his teeth in, and he was wearing bib overalls.
The people in the yard still couldn’t believe Grandma was holding open house. This didn’t stop the reporter who was haunting the parlor, looking for more flesh to add to his story. And it didn’t stop Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, who came leading her father, an ancient codger half her size in full Civil War Union blue.
“We are here to pay our respects at this sad time,” Mrs. Weidenbach said when Grandma let them in. “When I told Daddy that Shotgun had been decorated by U. S. Grant and wounded three times at Bull Run, it brought it all back to him, and we had to come.” Her old daddy wore a forage cap and a decoration from the Grand Army of the Republic, and he seemed to have no idea where he was. She led him up to the coffin, where they admired the flowers. Grandma had planted a pitcher of glads from her garden at either end of the pine box. In each pitcher she’d stuck an American flag.
A few more people willing to brave Grandma came and went, but finally we were down to the reporter, who’d settled into the best chair, still nosing for news. Then who appeared at the front door but Mrs. Effie Wilcox, in a hat.
“Mrs. Dowdel, I’ve come to set with you overnight and see our brave old soldier through his Last Watch.”
In those days people sat up with a corpse through the final night before burial. I’d have bet money Grandma wouldn’t let Mrs. Wilcox in for a quick look, let alone overnight. But of course Grandma was putting on the best show possible to pull wool over the reporter’s eyes. Little though she seemed to think of townspeople, she thought less of strangers. Grandma waved Mrs. Wilcox inside, and in she came, her eyes all over the place. She made for the coffin, stared at the blank white gauze, and said, “Don’t he look natural?”
Then she drew up a chair next to the reporter. He flinched because he had it on good authority that she’d just been let out of an insane asylum. “Warm, ain’t it?” she said straight at him, but looking everywhere.
The crowd outside finally dispersed. Mary Alice and I hung at the edge of the room, too curious to be anywhere else.
“If you’re here for the long haul,” Grandma said to the reporter, “how about a beer?” He looked encouraged, and Grandma left him to Mrs. Wilcox, which was meant as a punishment. She came back with three of her home brews, cellar-cool. She brewed beer to drink herself, but these three bottles were to see the reporter through the night. She wouldn’t have expected her worst enemy, Effie Wilcox, to drink alcohol in front of a man.
In normal circumstances the family recalls stories about the departed to pass the long night hours. But these circumstances weren’t normal, and quite a bit had already been recalled about Shotgun Cheatham anyway.
Only a single lamp burned, and as midnight drew on, the glads drooped in their pitchers. I was wedged in a corner, beginning to doze, and Mary Alice was sound asleep on a throw rug. After the second beer the reporter lolled, visions of Shotgun’s Civil War glories no doubt dancing in his head. You could hear the tick of the kitchen clock. Grandma’s chin would drop, then jerk back. Mrs. Wilcox had been humming “Rock of Ages,” but tapered off after “let me hide myself in thee.”
Then there was the quietest sound you ever heard. Somewhere between a rustle and a whisper. It brought me around, and I saw Grandma sit forward and cock her head. I blinked to make sure I was awake, and the whole world seemed to listen. Not a leaf trembled outside.
But the gauze that hung down over the open coffin moved. Twitched.
Except for Mary Alice, we all saw it. The reporter sat bolt upright, and Mrs. Wilcox made a little sound.
Then nothing.
Then the gauze rippled as if a hand had passed across it from the other side, and in one place it wrinkled into a wad as if somebody had snagged it. As if a feeble hand had reached up from the coffin depths in one last desperate attempt to live before the dirt was shoveled in.
Every hair on my head stood up.
“Naw,” Mrs. Wilcox said, strangling. She pulled back in her chair, and her hat went forward. “Naw!”
The reporter had his chair arms in a death grip. “Sweet mother of—”
But Grandma rocketed out of her chair. “Whoa, Shotgun!” she bellowed. “You’ve had your time, boy. You don’t get no more!”
She galloped out of the room faster than I could believe. The reporter was riveted, and Mrs. Wilcox was sinking fast.
Quicker than it takes to tell, Grandma was back, and already raised to her aproned shoulder was the twelve-gauge Winchester from behind the woodbox. She swung it wildly around the room, skimming Mrs. Wilcox’s hat, and took aim at the gauze that draped the yawning coffin. Then she squeezed off a round.
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.
The Mouse in the Milk
1930
From something Dad said, it had dawned on Mary Alice and me that our trip down to Grandma’s was meant to be an annual event.
Mary Alice pitched a fit. It meant another week of summer vacation away from her friends, Beverly and Audrey. Besides, she said she wasn’t over last year’s visit yet. One night she’d have a nightmare about old Shotgun Cheatham sitting up in his coffin, and on the night after that she’d dream that Grandma’s big old tomcat was jumping at her. Or so she said.
But having no choice, we went. If any of us had grown over the year, it was Grandma herself. And she still seemed to prize her privacy as much as ever. She mostly stayed home because she said the whole town was a slum and she didn’t give two hoots about it. And she wouldn’t even have a radio in her house.
Mary Alice brought her jump rope to keep herself occupied, though she said jumping rope by yourself was the loneliest job in the world. I took a giant jigsaw puzzle to put together. It was supposed to depict Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. There wasn’t room for it in our Chicago apartment. But in the summers Grandma took down the stove that heated her front room, so there was space to leave a card table up.
One night soon after we arrived, I was working on the puzzle and Grandma was drowsing in her platform rocker. She said she never slept, but she had to wake herself up to go to bed. Earlier, before it got dark, Mary Alice had been jumping rope outside. There weren’t a lot of sidewalks in Grandma’s town, but a strip of concrete ran from her front door out to the countrified mailbox beside the road. Grandma and I had been listening to Mary Alice:
Jump said Coolidge,
Jump said Hoover,
Jump said the driver of the furniture mover.
And Mary Alice’s personal favorite:
I had a letter from Nellie,
And what do you think it said?
Nellie had a baby,
And its hair was red.
Now how many hairs were on that head?
One, two, three . . .
When she got up to 180, Grandma called her inside.
So now Mary Alice was sulking somewhere. Grandma’s breathing was steady, the way it got before she started snoring. Then I heard a horse clopping past.
That was no rare thing around here. But I noticed the silence when the horse stopped outside. Then right away heels kicked its sides, and the horse galloped off. It was a sound right out of a Tom Mix movie. I was reaching for a puzzle part that was just blue sky when a flash of light filled the bay window. Then an explosion shook the house and made my puzzle jump. It wasn’t as loud as the time Grandma squeezed off two rounds right here in the front room. But it brought her out of her chair.
Like a ship under sail, she made for the front door. Mary Alice appeared from somewhere, and we both looked around Grandma into the night. You could barely see a stump out by the road. It was the post that had held the mailbox. But the mailbox was gone—in several directions. We heard a piece of metal slide down the shingles of the roof, bounce off the gutter, and fall through the snowball bushes.
Somebody on horseback had blown Grandma’s mailbox sky high. The Fourth of July was over, but there were still plenty of loose fireworks around. And this was no small charge, not a baby-waker or even a torpedo. This could have been the work of a cherry bomb.
Grandma planted her big fists on her big hips, and her jaw clenched in a familiar way.
“Cowgills,” she said, like that explained it.
Grandma slept in a room downstairs to save herself the stairs. Mary Alice and I had rooms upstairs. They were sparely furnished, with iron bedsteads and a lot of dead bugs on the sills. After I got used to how quiet the country was at night, I slept good up there. But I lay awake that night, recalling the sound when Grandma’s mailbox was blown to smithereens. I was ten, the age when things blowing up interested me, but I wondered who’d dare do this to Grandma.
My eyelids drooped, and it was morning. The smell of breakfast wafted up from the kitchen. You had to be downstairs on time and in your place, but Grandma’s breakfasts were worth it. Pancakes and corn syrup, fried ham and potatoes and onions, anything you wanted and as much.
Mary Alice and I were at the table, and Grandma was at the stove turning one last round of pancakes, when we got a visitor on the back porch. We all looked. The screen on the door blurred her, but it was Grandma’s old enemy, Mrs. Effie Wilcox. She didn’t make free to rap on the door. She just stood out on the porch in a faded apron and broken boots, working her hands. “Mrs. Dowdel, whoeee,” she called out in a tragic voice.
Grandma strolled over to the door. “What now?” she said through screen wire.
Mrs. Wilcox moaned. “First of all,” she said, “can I use it?”
She nodded down the back path to the cobhouse and the privy, and she didn’t mean the cobhouse.
“Feel free,” Grandma said. “Take a pew.”
But Mrs. Wilcox just stood there on the porch, wringing her hands. “I’m so nervous, I don’t know if—”
“What’s come over you?” Grandma said in her least interested voice.
Mrs. Wilcox whimpered. “Send them kids out of your kitchen so I can tell you.”
“They’re having their breakfast,” Grandma said, “and they’re from Chicago, so they’ve heard everything.”
“Well, it was last night,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “They come on my place and wrenched up my you-know-what by the posts and flung it all over the yard.”
“They knocked over your privy three months ahead of Halloween?” Grandma was interested at last. “What’s the world coming to?”
“That’s what I said,” Mrs. Wilcox replied. “I’m too nervous to live. All the laws of civilization has broke down, and town life is getting too dangerous. My only consolation is that there’s a prayer meeting at church tomorrow night. And I’ve got me some praying to do.”
“Do that,” Grandma said. But Mrs. Wilcox couldn’t wait another minute. She darted off the porch and down the path to our privy.
Grandma settled into her chair to smother her last pancake with corn syrup. Then once again she said, “Cowgills.”
Presently, Mary Alice slipped down from her chair and headed outside. When she got to the screen door, Grandma said, “I wouldn’t use the privy all morning if I was you.”
That next morning when I came into the kitchen, a sight stopped me dead in the door. Behind me, Mary Alice pulled up short too. Next to a box of shells, Grandpa Dowdel’s old double-barreled Winchester Model 21 was on the kitchen table, along with a greasy rag, like Grandma meant to clean it. Just the sight of that gun made my ears ring. Then I saw somebody besides Grandma was in the kitchen, over by the door.
He was a big, tall galoot of a kid with narrow eyes. His gaze kept flitting to the shotgun. The uniform he had on was all white with a cap to match. In his hand was a wire holder for milk bottles. He was ready to make his escape, but Grandma was saying, “I hope I have better luck with your milk today than the last batch. I found a de
ad mouse in your delivery yesterday.”
The kid’s narrow eyes widened. “Naw you never,” he said.
“Be real careful about calling a customer a liar,” she remarked. “I had to feed that milk to the cat. And the mouse too, of course.”
“Naw,” the kid said, reaching around for the knob on the screen door behind him.
Grandma was telling one of her whoppers. If she’d found a mouse in the milk, she’d have exploded like the mailbox. She was telling a whopper, and I wondered why.
“And another thing,” she said. “I won’t be needing a delivery tomorrow, neither milk nor cream. I’m going away.”
First we’d heard of it. Mary Alice nudged me hard.
“I’ll be gone tonight and all day tomorrow, and I don’t want the milk left out where it’ll sour. I won’t pay for it. I’m taking my grandkids on a visit to my cousin Leota Shrewsbury.”
Another whopper, and a huge one. Grandma off on a jaunt and us with her? I didn’t think so. She didn’t do things that cost. And she never told anybody her business.
Turning from the stove, she pretended surprise at seeing Mary Alice and me there, though she had eyes in the back of her head. “Why, there’s my grandkids now.” She pointed us out with a spatula. “They’re from Chicago. Gangs run that town, you know,” she told the kid. “My grandson’s in a gang, so you don’t want to mess with him. He’s meaner than he looks.”
I hung in the doorway, bug-eyed and short. She was saying I—Joey Dowdel—was a tough guy from Chicago, and this kid was twice my size. He could eat me for lunch.
“This here’s Ernie Cowgill,” she said, finishing off the introductions. With a sneer at me, Ernie Cowgill disappeared through the door and stomped off the porch.
“Grandma,” I croaked, “you’ll get me killed.”
She waved that away. “I just said that for your protection. He’ll be scared of you now. He’d believe anything. He’s only in fourth grade.”
