by Richard Peck
“Grandma, he’s at least sixteen.”
“That’s right. And still in fourth grade,” she said. “He’s the runt of the Cowgill litter. He’s got three older brothers, and they’re big bruisers. They’re the ones you wouldn’t want to meet up with in a dark alley.”
She swept shotgun, shells, and the greasy rag off the kitchen table and put them all back behind the woodbox. Then she nodded at Mary Alice to set the table for breakfast.
When we sat down to eat, I said, “Grandma, what was the shotgun for?”
“Bait,” she said.
“Who’s Cousin Leota Shrewsbury?” Mary Alice asked.
“Who?” Grandma said.
I lurked pretty near home all day. I didn’t even go uptown to The Coffee Pot Cafe for fear I’d run into Ernie Cowgill and his brothers. Now I remembered where I’d heard the name. The horse-drawn milk wagon that delivered to the door had a sign on its side that read:
COWGILLS’ DAIRY FARM
FROM OUR CLOVER-FED COWS TO YOUR KITCHEN
STRICTLY SANITARY
FARM-FRESH EGGS OUR SPECIALTY
In fact, I’d seen Ernie driving it standing up, handling the reins through a hole in the front window of the wagon. Even at a distance he looked like somebody you wouldn’t want to know better.
It may have been just a coincidence that a family named Cowgill ran the dairy. I never knew.
Noticing how close to home I was keeping, Grandma told me to weed the garden. You didn’t want to hang around her too close, or she’d give you a job. The garden ran neat and tidy from the back porch down to the cobhouse beside the yard where she stretched her clothesline. I weeded through the heat of the day, and every time I got down by the cobhouse, I had a vision of all four Cowgill brothers stepping out of it. I could picture them hanging me from the eaves by my belt and taking turns slapping me to sleep. But I saw nothing but the crossed paws of the old tomcat, napping just inside the door.
The two rows of green onions made my eyes water, and the smell was making me woozy. I was thinking seriously of heatstroke when I heard Mary Alice shriek in the kitchen. She was no screamer, so it brought me to my feet. Now I thought Ernie Cowgill had gotten in and pounced on her. I jumped the garden rows, pounding for the house.
But it was only Grandma and Mary Alice in the kitchen. Mary Alice’s eyes were big as quarters, like Orphan Annie’s, and she had both hands clapped over her mouth. Grandma towered over the table. Held high in her hand was a mousetrap, with the mouse still in it. A good-sized mouse. Its tail dangled down so far, it looked like one of the flypaper strips that hung from her kitchen ceiling. The spring on the trap had caught the mouse at the neck and nearly pulled his head loose. He was hanging by a thread and not a pretty sight.
Mary Alice had already gone into shock. This was one more of those experiences she says gave her nightmares for years.
Grandma examined her catch. Now she moved the trap into position over the mouth of an empty bottle. She eased up the spring, and the mouse dropped straight in. He hit the bottom of the bottle with a soft thump.
She turned back to the drainboard and picked up another bottle, full of milk—fresh, I suppose, from Ernie Cowgill’s morning delivery. Without spilling a drop, she poured milk into the bottle on the table. Mary Alice and I watched like two paralyzed people as the milk rose around the mouse’s furry gray body until his whiskers began to float. As the milk closed over his head, Mary Alice bolted. If the back door had been latched, she’d have gone straight through screen wire.
Now Grandma was fitting a paper lid over the milk-and-mouse bottle. I knew not to ask why she was doing this. I didn’t even want to know.
Mary Alice didn’t come back in the house till supper time. Then she didn’t want any supper. I watched her move green beans and fatback around the plate with the fork big in her small hand. Grandma ate hearty. After a big wedge of layer cake she pulled back from the table. “Let’s step right along and get them dishes washed and dried and put up,” she said. She was in a hurry, and I couldn’t see why. But then I couldn’t see a moment ahead.
There was still some evening left, but the light was fading. Grandma stayed in the kitchen after we’d wandered into the front room. But as Mary Alice was reaching for her jump rope to take outside, Grandma turned up and said, “Not tonight.”
Mary Alice glowered but said nothing. She flopped on the settee and fidgeted. Then she started to go upstairs. She’d brought a book called The Hidden Staircase by Carolyn Keene, and she liked reading in bed. “Not tonight,” Grandma said. She sat at her ease in the platform rocker, with her sewing basket at her feet. She didn’t do much fancy needlework, but she mended everything. Mary Alice came over to lean against me while I worked on Colonel Lindbergh.
When it got so dark I couldn’t see the puzzle, I reached to turn on the lamp. But Grandma said, “Not tonight.”
By then we had to know we were in for something. “Shut the front door,” Grandma told Mary Alice, who was just a little gray shape, mouselike, as she went over to close it. “And shoot the bolt across,” said Grandma, who never locked her doors.
Now we three were only outlines in the dark parlor. Some plot was afoot. Mary Alice edged back on the settee. We were all waiting for something. It was dark now. I could picture what the house looked like from outside. Locked up, not a light showing upstairs or down. All of us gone away to visit Cousin Leota Shrewsbury, who didn’t exist. Half an hour passed. Then Grandma spoke, making us leap. “We could tell ghost stories,” she said.
“Not tonight,” Mary Alice said in a small voice.
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:
Wash me clean of all I’ve been
And hang me out to dry;
Purify me, thought and deed,
That I may dwell on high!
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:
Drive the devil from my soul,
Tie him to a tree;
Let me rise into the skies
That I may dwell with Thee!
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.
Hate the sin, but love the sinner,
Though let him feel the rod;
Lift me like a little child
That I may dwell with—
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.
A One-Woman Crime Wave
1931
A Great Depression had swept over the nation, and we couldn’t seem to throw it off. It was still Hoovering over us, as people said. It hadn’t bottomed out yet, but it was heading that way.
You could see hard times from the window of the Wabash Blue Bird. The freight trains on the siding were loaded down with men trying to get from one part of the country to another, looking for work and something to eat. Mary Alice and I watched them as they stood in the open doors of the freight cars. They were walking along the right-of-way too, with nothing in their hands.
Then when we got off the train at Grandma’s, a new sign on the platform read:
DRIFTERS KEEP MOVING
THIS MEANS YOU
(SIGNED) O. B. DICKERSON, SHERIFF
But at Grandma’s house it seemed to be business as usual. Mary Alice was still skittish about the old snaggletoothed tomcat in the cobhouse. Grandma said if he worried her that much, she ought to use the chamber pot in place of the privy. Chamber pots were under all the beds, and they were handy at night. But Mary Alice wouldn’t use hers during the day. She didn’t want to climb the stairs just for that. And she didn’t want to have to empty it any more than necessary.
