by Richard Peck
“Vandalia. You’ve got her. She didn’t come home last night, and she ain’t at work today. She was seen comin’ in this house. That girl done brought her.” Miz Eubanks poked a finger in Mary Alice’s face, which was frozen with fear.
I was observing the scene over the rim of the soap pot, and I was all eyes.
“Who seen her come in here?” Grandma said. “I didn’t.”
“Everybody in town,” Miz Eubanks barked.
Grandma nodded. She knew everybody knew everything, often before it happened.
“Well, let me tell you how it’ll be, Idella,” Grandma said in a reasonable voice. “If you want to search my house, you’ll have to get past me. And I’ll tell you something else for free. If you set a foot over that doorsill, I’ll wring your red neck.”
Miz Eubanks made one of her fists and seemed about to put it through the screen door. She was dancing with rage. With a strangled cry, she dashed off the porch, heading for the buckboard. Her old mule saw her coming and shied.
She rattled off the property, and Mary Alice stood there on the porch, wilting.
Things quieted down after that. Grandma disappeared from the screen door. I went back to scraping the pot, and pretty soon Mary Alice went back to practicing her tap. But real slow. Her timing was all off.
By noon I knocked off work for a stop at the privy before dinner. I was almost in it with only one thing on my mind when something moved in the cobhouse door. Somebody was there, and he stepped out into my path. I nearly jumped over the privy.
It was a guy in a tight suit, a high collar, and a silk necktie. I’d seen him uptown, but couldn’t put a name to him. He looked me over and decided I was old enough that he’d have to deal with me.
“Junior Stubbs,” he said, putting out a hand to shake.
“Ah,” I said. “Could you wait a minute?”
When I came out of the privy, he gave me a business card that read:
STUBBS & ASKEW
General Insurance Agents
Wind and Fire Coverage Our Specialty
“I’m in business with my daddy,” he explained. “Merle Stubbs.”
I fingered the card. “I doubt if my grandma is in the market for any insurance.”
“Mrs. Dowdel?” he said. “Oh no. You can’t sell her anything.”
He had a jiggly Adam’s apple, I noticed. “I happened to be passing,” he said.
“Between the cobhouse and the privy?”
“Well, no.” He looked down at his shoes. “I was holed up here, to tell you the truth. I’m on my lunch hour. You got Vandalia Eubanks in your house, am I right?”
“Everybody says so,” I said. “Why? Do you want to sell Vandalia some insurance?”
“No,” he said. “I want her.”
I blinked in the midday sun while he waited for me to work this out. “Could you get a message to Vandalia?” he asked, pulling out another of his cards. “You can read what’s on the back of it, just to show you I mean business.”
I turned the card over and read,
Come steal away with me, sweetheart,
Let nothing no longer keep us apart,
Break yourself free of your mother’s rule,
She never knew love and she’s just being cruel.
I love you, honey,
Junior
My ears burned like fire. Now that I was thirteen, it took less than this to embarrass me.
“Do your best,” he said. “It’s now or never for me. If her old ma gets her home again, I’m a dead duck. Tell Vandalia I’ll be back in the cobhouse tonight by dark, with hope in my heart.”
Then Junior cut out. I watched him scale Grandma’s back fence in his suit.
By midafternoon I’d done all I could do on the soap pot, and a nickel was burning a hole in my pocket. I was thinking hard about a Nehi. But before I could make my escape, a car pulled up in front of Grandma’s house, a 1930 Ford Model A sedan. A lady and a man got out and started up the front walk. I went in the kitchen door, not wanting to miss anything.
Grandma was already at the front door, and Mary Alice was hanging around the foot of the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. I palmed Junior’s poem to her, and she stuck it down the front of her shirt where the sausage sandwich had earlier gone.
“Junior’ll be in the cobhouse by nightfall,” I murmured.
And Mary Alice nodded.
“Whatever you’re selling, Merle,” Grandma was saying at the front door, “I don’t want any.”
Mr. Merle Stubbs and his wife overflowed the front door. “Now, Mrs. Dowdel, I’m not here in my professional capacity. I have took time off work and brought Mrs. Stubbs with me to have a friendly word with you.”
They got their feet in the door, and Grandma let them take chairs in the front room. “What do you want?” she said, not sitting.
“Nothing in the world but to chat with you on a private matter.” Mr. Stubbs shifted one leg over the other.
“There’s no private matters in this town, Merle,” Grandma said. “Everybody’s private business is public property.”
“Yes, and you’ve stuck your nose in ours!” Mrs. Stubbs said, speaking up sharp. “You got that Eubanks gal upstairs this minute.” Mrs. Stubbs glared at the ceiling. “She’s trying to steal my son, and you’re helping her out. She’s gotten away from her maw, so she’s halfway there!”
Grandma’s spectacles flashed her a warning. But Mr. Stubbs said, “Now, now, Mrs. Stubbs is upset and off her feed about our boy, Junior. He’s lost all his judgment and wants to marry a Eubanks.”
“Do tell.” Grandma’s big arms were folded in front of her. “So what?”
“We’ve got a position in the community,” Mr. Stubbs said. “We don’t need a connection with such as the Eubankses. I’m as democratic as the next guy, but there’s limits. Besides, Idella Eubanks is half-cracked, and it could run in the family. Think of the children.”
“Have you talked it over with Junior?” Grandma asked.
“You can’t talk sense to him,” Mrs. Stubbs replied. “He’s bewitched.”
Mary Alice and I lurked near, taking in every word. About the only thing Vandalia and Junior had going for them as a couple was that they weren’t cousins.
A thud occurred then. Mary Alice and I both heard it. Something hit the outside of the house, nothing loud. Just a thud. Grandma heard. She began to drift toward the front door, but she went on talking to the Stubbses. “Well, it’s no skin off my nose,” she said calmly, “but seems like your boy’s old enough to make up his own mind. How old is he?”
“Thirty,” Mrs. Stubbs said, “but he’s a young thirty.”
Grandma was at the front door now. She pulled it open and stalked outside. We all followed, naturally, to find her in the middle of the yard with her hands on her hips, staring back at the house.
A ladder had appeared, propped against the sill of an upstairs bedroom window. On the top of the ladder was Miz Idella Eubanks in her sunbonnet. She was working away, trying to jimmy loose the catch on a window screen.
Grandma gazed. Of all the invasions of her privacy, this one took the cake.
“For the love of Pete!” Mrs. Stubbs looked up, shading her eyes. “It’s that trashy Eubanks woman trying to get her girl back. I hope she does! I hope she takes her home and sticks her down the well!”
Miz Eubanks had to notice the yard below had filled up with people. But now she had the screen loose and was ducking under to get inside. She had one knee on the sill.
That’s as far as she got. Grandma strolled over and took the ladder in both hands. She jerked it free of the ground, and it fell, scraping down the house.
It must have seemed to Miz Eubanks that the world had dropped out from under her. She had one knee on the windowsill and the rest of her was in space. She grabbed the window screen, and it came with her as she fell.
She was in the air a long moment, turning as she dropped, legs working hard. Then she crashed through the snowball bushes, st
ill clutching the screen.
“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Mr. Stubbs cried, “and she’s not insured!”
The top of a nodding snowball had snagged her sunbonnet, but Miz Eubanks herself was down among the roots, beginning to crawl out from under the bushes that had broken her fall. Again she was wheezing.
Forgetting their differences, Mr. Stubbs would have gone to her aid. But Mrs. Stubbs took him in hand and headed to their Ford. Over her shoulder Mrs. Stubbs called back, “I hope this puts an end to the entire unfortunate business. And I don’t want any more interference from you, Mrs. Dowdel!”
“Get in the car, Lula,” Mr. Stubbs said. And they gunned away as fast as a Ford goes.
Miz Eubanks sat in the yard, dazed. Grandma stood above her. “There’s my property line,” she said, pointing it out. “Get over it.”
Miz Eubanks limped away, steaming. Where she’d parked her mule I didn’t know, if it was still alive. She turned around just off Grandma’s territory. “You done abdicated my girl,” she howled, “but I’ll git her back. You watch!”
I looked up at the bedroom window with the missing screen. A face appeared there briefly, ghostly pale. And it wasn’t Skipper the puppy.
By eight o’clock that night the whole town knew everything. Defying his parents, Lula and Merle, Junior Stubbs was known to be in Grandma’s cobhouse, waiting to make his move. And Vandalia Eubanks, tucked away upstairs in Grandma’s house, was ready to make hers, in spite of her half-cracked mother, Idella.
The Wabash Cannonball train was due through on its run between Detroit and St. Louis. It was going to make its usual quick stop at 8:17, and the runaway couple were going to elope on it. Everybody said so.
The Coffee Pot Cafe was doing its best business in several years because its front windows looked out on the depot. Word had spread, and people had driven in from all over the county to witness the showdown. The Stubbses meant to be on the platform to talk Junior out of it. The whole Eubanks clan was coming to town to get Vandalia back. Nobody agreed on how many big brothers she had, but there were several.
Things didn’t go according to plan, though. When the Wabash Cannonball steamed in on schedule, the town bulged with people, but the lovebirds, Junior and Vandalia, were absent.
The Cannonball pulled out without them, leaving Merle and Lula Stubbs and all the Eubankses milling on the platform. The train gathered speed past Grandma’s house, and Grandma was at the front door to see it go through. Mary Alice watched from an upstairs bedroom window.
But then with a piercing shriek that rent the evening air, the powerful locomotive set its brakes. It skidded a quarter of a mile before it could come to a stop.
There was a little haze that night, a little mist. Down by the haunted timber a deathly figure stood, shrouded in black, swinging an old-time lantern. The Phantom Brakeman seemed to hover between the tracks, dimly bathed in yellow lantern light. The engineer stuck his head out of the locomotive and stared down the track with widening eyes. Before he could send the fireman to investigate, the ghastly figure had vanished in the haze, melted in the mist.
But it gave Vandalia and Junior their chance. They came up, hand in hand, from the other side of the Wabash tracks and scrambled aboard the open platform at the back of the parlor car. When the Cannonball pulled out again, they were on it, together at last.
That was one night Grandma didn’t have to wake herself up to go to bed. As I came in the front room, she was there in her platform rocker, saying to Mary Alice, “Next time you bring a stray home, make it a puppy.”
Mary Alice stared.
“You can call it Skipper,” Grandma suggested.
“How’d you know—”
“I heard you tell your brother that Vandalia Eubanks was a puppy. I can hear all over the house. I got ears on me like an Indian scout. And I don’t sleep.”
Grandma looked up at me. “Get everything squared away?” she asked.
And yes, I had. I’d taken off Grandpa Dowdel’s big old black overcoat and put it back in the cobhouse with the old lantern, where I’d found them.
Things with Wings
1934
When we got down off the train, Grandma was there on the platform. After our first visit she’d never met us at the train, figuring we could find our own way. But here she was, under her webby old black umbrella to shade her from the sun.
But she wasn’t there to meet us. She was seeing somebody off. A lady was climbing up into the car behind ours. We caught only a squint in the dazzling light, but knew the hat. It was Mrs. Effie Wilcox. With a powerful arm, Grandma swung Mrs. Wilcox’s bulging valise aboard, then a picnic hamper. She stepped back as the Blue Bird pulled out. She didn’t wave, but scanned the windows to see if Mrs. Wilcox found a seat. Then Grandma turned to us.
You could never call her a welcoming woman, but today her mind was truly miles away. I was falling behind with our suitcase, though this year I was nearly as tall as Grandma herself.
“Was Mrs. Wilcox going on a trip?” Mary Alice inquired.
“She’s gone for good,” Grandma said. “Off to double up with her sister at Palmyra. Bank’s foreclosing on her house, so she lit out, not wanting to watch them dump her stuff in the road. After Wilcox died, she left the farm and bought that house in town. But she can’t keep up with the payments.”
At noon dinner that day Mary Alice and I distracted Grandma with all the excitement we’d left behind in Chicago. In July they’d killed John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One. He’d been on a long spree, robbing banks throughout the middle west. The public didn’t know whether they wanted him caught or not. He’d provided a lot of entertainment in hard times. Since he stole from banks, he was called a Robin Hood, though he wasn’t known for giving to the poor.
He’d gone to a picture show at the Biograph Theatre not far from our neighborhood. With him were two bad women, and one of them tipped off the cops, who filled him full of lead on the sidewalk. Then, to prove they’d finally nailed John Dillinger, the police put his body on display in the morgue basement. People trooped past for a look. Women dipped their handkerchiefs in his bloody wounds for souvenirs. But he was so bloated and shot up that some people said it wasn’t Dillinger at all. Rumor had it that he was holed up somewhere.
Mary Alice and I had sulked because neither Mother nor Dad would take us to view the riddled corpse. Recalling to ourselves Shotgun Cheatham, we thought we could take it. When we got back to school in September, everybody would say they’d seen the cadaver. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lost.
“I’d have took you,” Grandma said. We didn’t doubt it. Grandma wouldn’t have minded a look for herself at all that remained of John Dillinger.
Mary Alice and I went upstairs to sort out our clothes from the single suitcase. She was getting particular about how everything she wore had to be hung up on a hanger just so. “Grandma’s missing Mrs. Wilcox,” she mentioned.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s Grandma’s worst enemy. She says Mrs. Wilcox’s tongue is attached in the middle and flaps at both ends. The town’ll be quieter without her, and Grandma will like that.”
“You don’t know anything,” Mary Alice said. “Men don’t have any idea about women.”
So I loped uptown by myself, heading for Veech’s Gas and Oil, which was man’s country. Ray Veech ran the garage when his dad was farming, and I thought I had some business with him.
The town was half-asleep with August and the depression. A checker game was going on in The Coffee Pot Cafe as I went past, but nothing else. A knot of people outside Moore’s Store waited for the day-old bread to go half-price.
In the window of Stubbs & Askew, the insurance agency, you could put up handbills. The biggest was a drawing of the giant farm implement shed that Deere & Company was proposing to put up on the block where the old brickyard had been.
Next to it a handbill advertised a rummage sale at the United Brethren Church:
BRING & BUY
; Treasures, Trash, Bric-a-Brac
Down-to-Earth Prices
Lunch Provided by Our Ladies’ Circle
The last handbill was a schedule of the movies the Lions Club was showing at their outdoor picture show. They weren’t new movies. Some of them weren’t even talkies. It looked like a slow week.
I crossed the Wabash tracks past the grain elevator on my way to Veech’s garage, eating the dust of the trucks hauling in the beans. Veech’s garage had been the blacksmith shop, and they still kept the anvil inside. Now it was a one-pump filling station with an outdoor lift. I blundered along toward it. Then the dust cleared, and I saw her.
It was love at first sight, like I’d been waiting for her all my life. She stood on the pavement in front of Veech’s, shimmering in her loveliness. And so graceful she might glide past me as if I wasn’t there, leaving me in the dust.
She was a showroom-fresh Terraplane 8 from the Hudson Motor Car Company. A four-door sedan, tan, with red stripping and another touch of red at the hubcaps. Tears sprang and my eyes stung. I couldn’t help it. My hands curled like I had her steering wheel in my grip.
No car company had an agency in Grandma’s town, not even Ford. But Veech’s would order you a car. Ray’d said nobody had bought one in two years. He ducked out from under an ancient Locomobile up on the lift, working a greasy rag over his big hands.
Ray was seventeen and man-sized, and I’d worked hard to know him because I wanted him to teach me how to drive. He’d given me a couple of lessons last summer, but he wanted two dollars for the full course.
People around here didn’t overreact even when they hadn’t seen you for a year. Ray jerked a thumb back at the Locomobile he’d been working under. “Threw a rod.”
I nodded like I knew.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the Terraplane. “Somebody order it?”
Ray rubbed his stubbled chin with the back of his hand in a way I admired. “Who’s got seven hundred and ninety-five dollars? This baby’s top-of-the-line. Son, it’s got a radio.”
