by Richard Peck
At length Mrs. Weidenbach separated the two old warriors, though her hoopskirt got in the way. Grandma would have let them fight it out.
She came to the depot to see us off on the day we left. It was to be our last visit together, and I suppose she knew. But she didn’t say so.
As the Blue Bird appeared down the tracks, I had something to ask her. “Grandma, there’s a loose end in my mind.”
“Well, don’t trip over it,” she said.
“How do you know Uncle Grady Griswold is a hundred and three years old?”
“How do you know he’s not?” She held her spidery old black umbrella between herself and the sun.
“What I mean is, does he have a birth certificate or something like that?”
“A birth certificate?” She waved me away. “They didn’t have birth certificates in them days. You were just born, and people accepted it.”
But now the train was pulling in, hissing steam, so that was her last word. As Mary Alice and I scrambled aboard, Grandma heaved up a picnic hamper for us.
We were hardly out of town before we were both slumped half-asleep in the seat. A trip to Grandma really took it out of you. Dozing, I heard a mew. I looked down at our feet to see the lid rising on the picnic hamper. Two green eyes peered out.
I shot a look at Mary Alice, who was only pretending to be asleep. “What’s that?”
She blinked in surprise at the green eyes blinking back. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “It’s the kitten. Poor little thing. It took her three days to find her way back from Uncle Grady’s to the cobhouse. Grandma must have stuck her in the hamper, meaning me to have her. What a surprise.”
“And yet you don’t look too surprised.”
“You could knock me over with a feather.” Mary Alice sniffed, and lifted the kitten onto her lap.
“How do you know Mother’s going to let you keep that kitten?”
“How do you know she’s not?” said Mary Alice.
And we steamed on, riding the Wabash Blue Bird, bound for Chicago across the patchwork fields.
The Troop Train
1942
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. Another war came, World War II, and I wanted to get in it. The war looked like my chance to realize my old dream of flying. My soul began to swoop as it had all those years ago at the county fair when I’d had my first ride in Barnie Buchanan’s biplane. I only hoped the war would last long enough to make a flier out of me, and so it did.
I joined up at Fort Sheridan for the Army Air Corps. But before I could go to flight school, I had to do basic training down at Camp Leonard Wood.
On the night we were shipping out from Dearborn Station, it occurred to me that the troop train would pass through Grandma’s town, sometime in the night. I sent her a telegram. She never did have a phone. A telegram might give her a turn, but I just wanted to tell her the train would be going through town, though it wouldn’t stop.
In the way of troop trains, we left an hour late and sat on the siding outside Joliet for another hour. You don’t get any sleep on a troop train. Our car was blue with smoke and noisy with a floating crap game. I sat through the long night, propped at the window.
Then I knew we were getting to Grandma’s town. It was sound asleep in the hour before dawn. We slowed past the depot, and now we were coming to Grandma’s, the last house in town. It was lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. Every window upstairs and down blazed, though she always turned out the light when she left a room. Now we were rolling past, and there was Grandma herself.
She stood at her door, large as life—larger, framed against the light from her front room. Grandma was there, watching through the watches of the night for the train to pass through. She couldn’t know what car I was in, but her hand was up, and she was waving—waving big at all the cars, hoping I’d see.
And I waved back. I waved long after the window filled with darkness and long distance.
HERE’S A SNEAK PREVIEW
OF THE SEQUEL TO
A LONG WAY FROM CHICAGO
A YEAR DOWN YONDER
It’s 1937, and the Depression has hit the Dowdel family hard. Mr. Dowdel has lost his job, as well as the family home, and seventeen-year-old Joe is out West, planting trees through a government work program. If Mary Alice were a boy, and just a bit older, she’d be with him. But she’s fifteen and a girl, and she’s been sent to spend the next school year with Grandma Dowdel.
It’s one thing to spend a summer in Grandma Dowdel’s sleepy small town—but an entire year? How will city slicker Mary Alice make it?
Turn the page for the first chapter of Richard Peck’s A Year Down Yonder!
Rich Chicago Girl
Oh, didn’t I feel sorry for myself when the Wabash Railroad’s Blue Bird train steamed into Grandma’s town. The sandwich was still crumbs in my throat because I didn’t have the dime for a bottle of pop. They wanted a dime for pop on the train.
My trunk thumped out onto the platform from the baggage car ahead. There I stood at the end of the world with all I had left. Bootsie and my radio.
Bootsie was my cat, with a patch of white fur on each paw. She’d traveled in a picnic hamper. Bootsie had come from down here, two summers ago when she was a kitten. Now she was grown but scrawny. She’d spent the trip trying to claw through the hamper. She didn’t like change any more than I did.
My portable radio was in my other hand. It was a Philco with a leatherette cover and handle. Portable radios weighed ten pounds in those days.
As the train pulled out behind me, there came Grandma up the platform steps. My goodness, she was a big woman. I’d forgotten. And taller still with her spidery old umbrella held up to keep off the sun of high noon. A fan of white hair escaped the big bun on the back of her head. She drew nearer till she blotted out the day.
You couldn’t call her a welcoming woman, and there wasn’t a hug in her. She didn’t put out her arms, so I had nothing to run into.
Nobody had told Grandma that skirts were shorter this year. Her skirttails brushed her shoes. I recognized the dress. It was the one she put on in hot weather to walk uptown in. Though I was two years older, two years taller than last time, she wasn’t one for personal comments. The picnic hamper quivered, and she noticed. “What’s in there?”
“Bootsie,” I said. “My cat.”
“Hoo-boy,” Grandma said. “Another mouth to feed.” Her lips pleated. “And what’s that thing?” She nodded to my other hand.
“My radio.” But it was more than a radio to me. It was my last touch with the world.
“That’s all we need.” Grandma looked skyward. “More noise.”
She aimed one of her chins down the platform. “That yours?” She meant the trunk. It was the footlocker Dad had brought home from the Great War.
“Leave it,” she said. “They’ll bring it to the house.” She turned and trudged away, and I was supposed to follow. I walked away from my trunk, wondering if I’d ever see it again. It wouldn’t have lasted long on the platform in Chicago. Hot tongs wouldn’t have separated me from Bootsie and my radio.
The recession of thirty-seven had hit Grandma’s town harder than it had hit Chicago. Grass grew in the main street. Only a face or two showed in the window of The Coffee Pot Cafe. Moore’s Store was hurting for trade. Weidenbach’s bank looked to be just barely in business.
On the other side of the weedy road, Grandma turned the wrong way, away from her house. Two old slab-sided dogs slept on the sidewalk. Bootsie knew because she was having a conniption in the hamper. And my radio was getting heavier. I caught up with Grandma.
“Where are we going?”
“Going?” she said, the picture of surprise. “Why, to school. You’ve already missed pretty nearly two weeks.”
“School!” I’d have clutched my forehead if my hands weren’t full. “On my first day here?”
Grandma stopped dead and spoke clear. “You�
�re going to school. I don’t want the law on me.”
“Grandma, the law’s afraid of you. You’d grab up that shotgun from behind the woodbox if the sheriff came on your place.”
It was true. The whole town knew Grandma was trigger-happy.
“Well, I don’t want it to come to that.” She trudged on.
I could have broken down and bawled then. Bootsie in her hamper, banging my knees. The sun beating down like it was still summer. I could have flopped in the weeds and cried my eyes out. But I thought I better not.
Under a shade tree just ahead was a hitching rail. Tied to it were some mostly swaybacked horses and a mule or two that the country kids rode to school. One horse was like another to me, but Grandma stopped to look them over.
There was a big gray with a tangled tail, switching flies. Grandma examined him from stem to stern. I thought she might pry his jaws apart for a look at his teeth. She took her time looking, though I was in no hurry.
Then on she went across a bald yard to the school. It was wooden-sided with a bell tower. I sighed.
On either side of the school was an outdoor privy. One side for the boys, one for the girls. Labeled. And a pump.
Grandma slowed again as the bell tower rose above us. She’d never been to high school. She’d been expelled from a one-room schoolhouse long before eighth grade. I happened to know this.
Crumbling steps led up to a front entrance. Somebody had scrawled a poem all over the door:
Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust,
Oil them brains
Before they rust.
Steps led down to the basement under the front stoop. Grandma went down there, closing her umbrella.
The basement was one big room. A basketball hoop hung at either end, but it didn’t look like a gym to me. Smelled like one, though.
A tall, hollow-cheeked man leaned on a push broom in the center of the floor.
“Well, August!” Grandma boomed, and the room echoed.
This woke him up. When he saw Grandma, he swallowed hard. People often did. He wore old sneakers and a rusty black suit under a shop apron. His necktie was fraying at the knot.
“I’ve brought this girl to be enrolled.” Grandma indicated me with a thumb. She didn’t say I was her granddaughter. She never told more than the minimum.
I stood there, fifteen, trying to die of shame. Grandma didn’t understand about high school. She was trying to get the janitor to enroll me.
But I had it all wrong. They’d fired the janitor when times got hard. August—Mr. Fluke—was the principal, which made him the coach too. And he taught shop to the boys. And swept up.
“Well, Mrs. Dowdel,” the principal said, “can this girl read and cipher?” Even I saw he was pulling Grandma’s leg, which never worked.
“Good enough to get by in a school like this,” she replied.
Mr. Fluke turned to me. “Mary Alice, is it? Down from Chicago?” Everybody in this town knew everything about you. They knew things that hadn’t even happened yet. “What grade did they have you in up there?”
“Would have been tenth,” I mumbled. “Sophomore.”
“Let’s call that junior year down here,” Mr. Fluke said. “It don’t matter, and there’s plenty of room for you. High school’s getting to be a luxury in times like these. So many boys have dropped out entirely, I don’t where I’ll find five to play basketball, come winter, or to field the Christmas program.”
The thought of winter—Christmas—here chilled my heart.
“Oh, we’ll pull a couple of the farm boys back after they get the last of the hay in,” Mr. Fluke went on. “But some of ’em won’t drift back to school till that last ear of corn is picked in November. You know boys.”
Grandma nodded. “Boys is bad business,” she said, quite agreeable for her. “Though girls is worse.”
But Grandma never had time to waste visiting. Shortly Mr. Fluke was sending us up to Miss Butler’s classroom. It was at the top of some rickety stairs. At the front of the room, Miss Butler was reading aloud:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Oh woe. Shakespeare even here. My heart sank to my shoes. But it sounded like they were coming to the end.
From out in the hall Grandma and I saw that the students sat two-by-two in old-timey double desks. One girl sat alone. Grandma nudged me. “See that big girl with the dirty hair?”
You couldn’t miss her. “Who is she?”
“One of the Burdick girls. Mildred, I think. They’re kin of the Eubankses. Steer clear of her if you can. Watch your back if you can’t.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s a Burdick.”
But then Grandma was pushing me forward. Somehow she’d taken Bootsie and the radio out of my hands. My hands were like ice. I teetered on the threshold. When Grandma loomed up behind me, all three boys in the classroom threw up their hands and hollered out, “Don’t shoot! We give up!”
Which is a boy’s idea of trying to be funny. I personally thought they ought to show more respect for an old lady, even if it was Grandma.
Miss Butler saw us and clapped a hand against her straight bosom. “Oh hark,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Dowdel, and . . .”
“Mary Alice Dowdel,” I said in a wobbly voice. “I’m enrolled.”
“Well, how . . . nice,” Miss Butler said, avoiding Grandma’s eye. “Boys and girls, this is Mary Alice Dowdel, come down to us from Chicago. I guess times are hard up there too.”
There was absolutely no privacy in a town this size. I saw how hard Grandma had to work to keep people’s noses out of her business. I looked back at her and she was gone.
“Mary Alice, honey,” Miss Butler was saying, “you can share with Mildred Burdick until we find you some schoolbooks. Mildred, move over and make Mary Alice welcome.”
The day went straight downhill from there.
Mildred Burdick took up more than her share of the seat. And she didn’t look any better up close. While Miss Butler bustled at the blackboard, Mildred looked me over, and she didn’t like what she saw. She started with the top of my head. Mother had given me a finger wave, and it was real tight from a center parting.
Mildred’s lip curled.
For traveling, I had on my second-best summer cotton, the one with the puff sleeves and the three big celluloid buttons off one of Mother’s dresses. Mildred looked at my puff sleeves like they ought to come off. Then she dipped down for a look at my feet. I had on my Easter shoes with the open toes, and bobby socks.
Mildred made a little buzz-saw sound in her throat that would have worried anybody. I didn’t want to stare at what she was wearing. It seemed to be a lumberjack shirt. She smelled real warm. I felt eyes on me from all over the room. Everybody was watching.
“I’ll make ya welcome,” Mildred rasped. She made a big fist and showed it to me, under the desk. “Rich Chicago girl.”
I sighed. “If I was rich, I wouldn’t be here.”
Now Mildred was in my face. She had one blue eye and one green. Burdicks did, but I didn’t know that then, and it was distracting. “Where’d ya get that dress?” Her breath took mine away.
“Mother made it,” I said. “From a Butterick pattern.”
“You wear a thing like that to school up in Chicago?”
I nodded, helpless.
“How big is that school up in Chicago?”
“I don’t know. About a thousand kids.” I wondered if Miss Butler was ever going to turn around from the blackboard.
Mildred’s eerie eyes widened. “Liar,” she said. “Ya owe me a dollar, rich Chicago girl.”
Now somebody tapped my arm, just below that puff sleeve. A starved-looking girl with big eyes was leaning across from her desk. I didn’t know her, of course, but she turned out to be Ina-Rae Gage. Now her lips were in my ear.
“Don’t mess with Mildred,” she said moistly. “She ate my lunch.”
&nbs
p; “She wants a dollar,” I whispered back.
“Don’t cross her. Better settle with her,” Ina-Rae whispered in return. “She’ll foller you home. She does that.”
Mildred jabbed me. Her arms were big, but her elbow was sharp. “Ya owe me a buck,” she reminded. “And I ain’t afraid of your grandma. Ya oughtta see mine. Mine drinks straight from the bottle and wears tar all over to keep off the fleas. And my paw’s meaner than a snake. He’s tougher than any of them Chicago gangsters. He’s worse than Pretty Boy Floyd, and lots uglier.”
I didn’t doubt it.
At last, Miss Butler turned around. “Take out your history books, boys and girls,” she trilled. “Hop to it like bedbugs!”
“I thought this was English class,” I whispered across to Ina-Rae. “Wasn’t that Shakespeare?”
“Who?” Ina-Rae said.
But I was to learn that we had English and history and geography from Miss Butler. Then we went across the hall and had math and science from Mr. Herkimer. He taught the boys Ag. and Miss Butler taught Home Ec. to the girls. We were back and forth. And this wasn’t the junior class. It was half the school. Ina-Rae was a freshman. What Mildred was, nobody knew. I sighed all afternoon.
When school finally let out, Mildred marched me over to the hitching rail. All twenty-five of the students in high school milled in the yard. The boys were pegging out a game of horseshoes. But there was no help in sight for me. Everybody looked the other way.
Somehow Mildred seemed even bigger outdoors. She wore overalls under a snagged skirt because she rode a horse to school. It was the big gray with the twitching tail that had interested Grandma. And I have to say, Mildred’s horse was better-looking than she was.
For a terrible moment I thought she was going to make me ride up behind her. That horse looked sky high. But she said, briefly, “I ride. You walk.”
Right through the town we went, me in the dust of the road, ahead of the slobbering horse, Mildred riding astride like a bounty hunter.
