A Long Way From Chicago

by Richard Peck

  “Cockpit, Grandma,” I said. “Then you meant for me to have the ride all along?”

  Grandma didn’t reply.

  “And another thing. I’ve got a confession to make,” I said. “I know you wanted first prize on the pie. You wanted it bad. And I thought you’d switched the card on Mr. Pennypacker’s pie with yours so you could win with his pie.”

  She shot me her sternest look. But then easing back in the platform rocker, she said, “I did.”

  The Phantom Brakeman

  1933

  Down at Grandma’s the only thing that reminded us of home and Chicago was Nehi. This was orange pop at a nickel a bottle. With the twenty-five cents apiece that Dad gave Mary Alice and me, we could each buy five Nehis during our week, if we could slip off from Grandma long enough to get our allowances spent.

  The Coffee Pot Cafe kept the Nehis along with the Grapettes and the Dr Peppers in a sheet-metal vat of ice water with a bottle opener hanging down on a piece of twine. Grandma said she didn’t like Nehi because the bubbles in it gave her gas. Mary Alice said anything that cost money gave Grandma gas.

  We made ourselves scarce that first afternoon and headed uptown before Grandma could find us some chores. I was thirteen at last, so I’d thank you to call me Joe, not Joey, and I walked a few strides ahead of Mary Alice.

  For one thing, she’d been taking dancing lessons all year and never went anywhere without her tap shoes in a drawstring bag. The greatest movie star in history was sweeping the country at that time, a girl younger than Mary Alice named Shirley Temple. Shirley could sing and act, and she was a tap-dancing demon. Every girl in America was taking tap to be the next Shirley Temple.

  Though Mary Alice was getting a little too leggy to be a child star, Mother said taking tap would give her poise. So Mary Alice was apt to stop cold on a sidewalk and run through a tap routine in her regular sandals. I wasn’t going to wait while she did that, so we each acted like the other one wasn’t there.

  The only people in The Coffee Pot were a couple of farm women passing the time of day with Mrs. Ike Cripe. As proprietor, Mrs. Cripe wore a crocheted handkerchief pinned to her apron, and a hair net. She saw us come in. First the screen door closed behind me. Then it opened again, and Mary Alice made her entrance. You could tell that Mrs. Cripe wanted our nickels before we fished the Nehis out of the water. She was deep in conversation with the farm women, but when I started to put my nickel on the counter, her palm was outstretched to take it.

  Above on the wall was a framed picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d beaten out Hoover as president of the United States. He hung between two signs:

  DOUBLE-YOLK BREAKFAST

  SERVED ALL DAY

  with sausage, bacon, or ham, your choice

  20¢

  and

  BLUE PLATE SPECIAL

  liverwurst or tuna sandwich

  cup of our coffee thrown in

  10¢

  Mrs. Cripe and the farm women were remarking on what a handsome man Franklin Delano Roosevelt was.

  “Don’t it beat all how a man that good-lookin’ would marry a wife that plain?” said one of the farm women, who’d have known a thing or two about plainness. “That Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt is plain as a mud fence.”

  “Maybe she’s a good cook,” the other farm woman offered. “Kissin’ don’t last. Good cookin’ does.”

  Mrs. Cripe rang up two nickel sales on the register. “Men don’t have any idea about women,” she said. This big statement quieted the farm women. Then Mrs. Cripe said, “They’s cousins, you know.”

  “Who is?”

  “The Roosevelts. He married his cousin.”

  The toothpicks stopped dead in the farm women’s mouths. “You don’t mean it.”

  “It was in the paper.” Mrs. Cripe reached under her apron to adjust a strap.

  “Was it legal?” a farm woman whispered.

  “I couldn’t say,” Mrs. Cripe replied. “Them Roosevelts isn’t Illinois people.”

  Their voices dropped lower. I’d noticed before, marrying your cousin was a touchy subject around here. But now it was time for our Nehis. Half the pleasure was sticking your arm in up to the shirtsleeve and fishing in the ice water for the bottle.

  Mary Alice plunged in at her end. We took our time. In those days before air-conditioning, just getting one arm cooled off was a treat. We elbowed aside the Grapettes. You didn’t get enough for your money with a Grapette, and it left your mouth purple. And the Dr Peppers tasted like cough medicine. When we had our Nehis in hand and opened, Mary Alice took a booth at the back. I settled at the table with the checkerboard in the front window.

  In the past Mrs. Cripe had a fry cook and another lady working the counter. But she was down to herself now, except for a girl who was wiping the tables with a wet rag. You had to look twice to see her. She was that skinny, and pale as a ghost. A light breeze would have blown her into the back room. But she was keeping busy. She went at the tabletops like she was killing rats.

  When she worked her way to Mary Alice’s booth, they fell into a murmuring conversation. Mary Alice took out her tap shoes to show her, so it must be girl talk. I was glad to be up here away from it. I was coming to the age when I didn’t know how near girls I was supposed to be.

  Mrs. Cripe didn’t ring up a sale after the farm women left, so they may have come in just for the toothpicks. I was making my Nehi last. Then from my seat in the window I saw a woman pull up out front. She dropped down from a buckboard and tied her old mule to the rail. The mule wore a straw hat, and the woman wore a sunbonnet. She was the toughest-looking woman you ever saw. She made Mrs. Ike Cripe look like a movie star.

  Stomping through the front door in a pair of unmatching shoes, she made for the cash register. For a bad moment I thought she was going to hold up the place.

  “Well, Miz Eubanks,” Mrs. Cripe said, “what is it?”

  The sunbonnet woman, Miz Eubanks, stuck a grubby paw under Mrs. Cripe’s nose. “Let me have my girl’s wages.” She jerked her head to the back booth where the wispy girl was lingering at Mary Alice’s table.

  “I give her her fifteen cents already today,” Mrs. Cripe said.

  “You done paid her before she worked out her day?” Miz Eubanks was confounded. “A fool and her money is soon parted.” She headed for the wispy girl, whose eyes looked hunted and scared.

  Grabbing the front of the girl’s uniform, she said, “Gimme that fifteen cents, or I’ll turn you every way but loose.”

  The girl hung there in her mother’s grasp. Mary Alice sat below them, stunned. In a small voice the girl said, “I need my money.”

  “You don’t have no needs, except I say so,” the woman barked, nose to nose with her. “Cough it up.”

  When she turned her loose, the girl reached down as slow as she dared and took something out of her shoe. It must have been the full fifteen cents because Miz Eubanks’s hand closed over it, making a fist. She shook it at the girl.

  “And when you get home tonight, I’ll take your back wages out of your hide. Girl, you won’t set down till the first frost. I know what you’re up to, missy. You’re sly, but you don’t put nothin’ over on me.”

  She stalked out of the place, past Mrs. Cripe, who hadn’t liked being called a fool. The girl stood beside Mary Alice, trying not to cry.

  Mary Alice reached up to touch her hand. She was trying to say something to make the girl feel better. But I didn’t look or listen. I didn’t know what to do.

  Pretty soon we started for home. I’d left some Nehi in the bottom of the bottle, and I think Mary Alice did too. We walked together now. I waited when she stopped on an unbroken slab of sidewalk and went into one of her tap steps. She held her skirts out in the Shirley Temple way, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was just going through the motions, and her mind was somewhere else.

  “Who was that girl anyway?” I said finally.

  “Vandalia Eubanks,” she said, “and that old crow in the bonnet
was her mother. She wants to rule Vandalia’s life.”

  I shrugged. “Well, she’s her mother.”

  “She’s her jailer,” Mary Alice said. “Vandalia’s seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? She doesn’t look twelve.”

  “A starved seventeen,” Mary Alice said. “And she needs a friend.” Then her jaw clamped shut in Grandma’s own way, and she didn’t say anything else all the way home.

  When we got there, Grandma was out in the yard, standing over a thing made out of lumber in the shape of a teepee. Nearby was a pile of stove lengths on the circle of burned ground where she cooked down her apples for apple butter.

  She waved us over. “We’re makin’ soap.”

  Until we started coming to Grandma’s, we thought soap was a pink bar that came out of a wrapper labeled Cashmere Bouquet. But that cost seven cents, and Grandma made her own. She soon had us busy as bird dogs. She sent Mary Alice to the pump for pail after pail of water, and she sent me to the house for coal scuttles full of wood ash from the kitchen stove. Grandma poured the water through the teepee, which was a hopper. When it dropped through the ash, it came out as lye. Grandma caught it in a pan. We worked till supper time. Before we went inside, she built up a big fire from the stove lengths and shavings.

  After supper Grandma and I worked through what she called the cool of the evening. Mary Alice had managed to vanish, but the heavy work was over. The fire had burned down just right. Over the glowing embers Grandma put an old pot on a tripod. We’d dumped the lye into it, with just the right amount of water. Now she added what looked to me like garbage. Ham skins, bacon rinds, and things too mysterious to mention.

  We took turns stirring this witches’ brew as darkness crawled across the yard. The blossoms on the morning glory vine were little tight blue fists, and you could hear husky sighing from the cornfield across the fence.

  Grandma looked up—far out to the west, down where the road and the Wabash tracks seemed to meet. She scanned the far horizon, maybe waiting for me to ask what she was looking for.

  “What are you looking for, Grandma?”

  “The brakeman,” she said, still scanning.

  “You mean a brakeman off the Wabash Railroad?”

  She nodded. “This is about the time of evening he’s been known to show.”

  “Who is he, Grandma?”

  She turned on me. “You mean you never heard the story?” She took over the stirring, turning the paddle with both hands. “It happened back in 1871. And it all come to pass because of the Great Fire of Chicago. The town of Decatur was sending a special train full of volunteers up to fight that fire Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started.

  “Of course, railroad signals was very simple in them early times. And it was a foggy night. Somehow, the train full of firefighters got on the same track as a Wabash freight train. They met head on. It was just a half mile along them tracks, down by that stand of timber on the way to Salt Crick.”

  Grandma nodded down the road to the timber, a dark smudge in the distance.

  “Killed a brakeman on the freight train and both engineers. Oh, you never saw such a mess.” Grandma shook her head. “I was only a babe in arms, but I remember it well. My maw walked the tracks down there and held me up to see it. They’d pried the locomotives apart and taken out the dead. But it was a sight to behold. They said the dead bodies looked like they’d been fed through a sausage grinder.”

  I swallowed hard, but I was always interested in anything from her early life that might explain Grandma.

  The paddle in her hand turned slow in the foul brew as she looked down to the dark woods. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story.” She glanced my way. “The brakeman’s been seen since.”

  The darkness deepened around us, and a star or two came out. “The brakeman who got chewed up like he’d been through a sausage grinder?”

  Grandma nodded. “Years go by without a sighting. Then on a hazy night somebody’ll see the brakeman down there between the rails, swinging an old-time railroad lantern. Or they’ll spot a dim yellow light deep in the timber, like he’s a wandering soul, still trying to head off the oncoming train.”

  “Grandma,” I said in a breaking voice, though my voice was beginning to break anyway, “are you talking about the brakeman’s ghost?”

  She pursed her lips to give a considered opinion. “I don’t say one way or the other. All I know is some people won’t go down that road after dark by theirselves.”

  Grandma had hiked her skirts to keep them out of the fire, and the glowing embers made it hot as noon. But goose bumps popped out on my arms.

  “Of course, I’m talkin’ about ignorant people,” Grandma said. “Superstitious people.”

  I had some trouble settling down that night. It was the first night of the visit, so that was normal. But every time my eyes closed, I saw the phantom brakeman with hamburger meat for a face, swinging a ghostly lantern through tree branches like skeletons.

  So I was up and down. As bad luck would have it, my bedroom window looked west to the haunted woods. I’d keep getting up to look in case a lantern was swinging in the trees. But I didn’t see anything.

  Then I was no sooner asleep than I was awake again. Some sound woke me. I didn’t move in the bed, hoping not to hear any more. But I heard some snuffling, like crying. It seemed to come from Mary Alice’s room. I thought I heard her voice too, just a few words, though she never talked in her sleep.

  Now I was bolt awake, and the goose bumps were back. Wearing only my BVDs, I got up and looked out in the hall. Mary Alice’s door was shut tight, though we never closed our bedroom doors, hoping for a breeze. I crept over, but didn’t try the knob, which was bound to be locked. I rapped lightly. This brought forth a little startled yipping sound from inside.

  Quicker than if I’d awakened her, little feet padded across her creaking floor. Her keyhole spoke. “What?”

  “Mary Alice, are you alone in there?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Who do you think? Are you?”

  “. . . No,” she said. “And don’t whisper so loud.”

  “Who’s in there with you?”

  “A puppy.”

  “A puppy?” I said. “Where’d you get a puppy?”

  “The cobhouse.”

  “You don’t go in the cobhouse,” I said.

  “He came out. He followed me home. I’m calling him Skipper. That’s what you’re hearing, Joey. Don’t tell Grandma. She doesn’t believe in indoor pets.”

  I gave up, though I didn’t quite believe in the pet either, Skipper or whoever. But I was too tired to argue. I went back to bed and slept like a log.

  Grandma had already eaten her breakfast. She was at the stove, fixing ours. Sausage patties, which reminded me of the brakeman. And buttermilk biscuits and fried eggs over easy. Mary Alice turned up promptly, looking perky and innocent. I remembered Skipper.

  When Grandma’s back was turned, Mary Alice broke open a biscuit and stuck a sausage patty inside it. Then she pushed it down her shirt. She knew I was watching, but she didn’t meet my eye. The eggs were runny, so that was a problem for her. She thought about making an egg sandwich to go with the other biscuit, but gave it up. When Grandma turned back to the table, Mary Alice had licked her platter clean. She skidded out of her chair and was gone, back upstairs. Grandma gave her departing figure a long look.

  She’d mentioned that the night air would cool her brew to soap, so we went outside to see. The embers were white, and sure enough, the pot was solid with soap. Something like soap.

  It reminded me of the cheese she fed the catfish, and it didn’t smell much better. My job was to pry it out of the pot. Grandma hunkered in the grass with a butcher knife to carve it into cakes.

  “This here’s good soap,” she remarked as she went at it with the knife. “It lathers good, and it’ll take the top layer of skin right off you.”

  The sun hadn’t been up long, and the morning glories were just beg
inning to unfurl. Then far down the road a cloud of dust appeared, heading for town. Nearer, it was Miz Eubanks, the strings on her sunbonnet flying. She was standing up in her buckboard with a whip in her hand. Her old straw-hatted mule was galloping. I’d never seen a mule break into a trot, let alone a full gallop.

  The buckboard sped past the house, never slowing for town. Grandma stood up to watch it pass, fingering her chins thoughtfully.

  She gave me the chore of scraping out the soap pot, which looked like a long day’s work. I had to roll the pot in the grass and climb halfway in with a wire brush to loosen the clinging soap. It was a mean job, and some very strange-smelling stuff had gone into that soap. Grandma’d said that the full recipe for it would die with her.

  In an hour’s time I hadn’t made a dent in it. By then Mary Alice had come out on the back porch, wearing her tap shoes. She began to run through one of her routines, calling out the steps:

  Shuffle, ball, change, step, step

  Shuffle, ball, change, step, step

  I was scraping away on the pot, and she was tapping away on the porch, and if you asked me, she was acting entirely too innocent.

  We heard a clopping of hooves and a jangle of harness, and here came Miz Eubanks in her buckboard, back from uptown. She swerved into Grandma’s side yard and drew up. The old mule was foaming at the mouth and looked near death. Its straw hat was hanging from an ear.

  Miz Eubanks dropped down and lit running. She pounded up on the back porch, shoving Mary Alice aside. But even Miz Eubanks didn’t quite dare to storm into Grandma’s house. She gave the screen door a savage rattle though.

  Grandma appeared, big behind screen wire. “Well, Idella,” she said, “what have you got a burr under your tail about now?”

  Miz Eubanks was wheezing. She turned up the sleeves on her feedsack dress. “I need my girl back. You’ve got her in there.”

  “What have I got that’s yours?” Grandma queried.