by Richard Peck
“Don’t mess with Mildred,” she said moistly. “She ate my lunch.”
“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.
Grandma lived at the other end of town in the last house. She was sitting out in the swing on her back porch, though as a rule she kept busier than that. It almost looked like she was waiting for us.
I came dragging into the side yard with Mildred’s horse behind me. And Mildred. I guess I was glad to see Grandma there on the porch. I don’t know. I was pretty near the end of my rope.
Mildred dropped down and tied her horse to a tree. Grandma was on her feet now. The swing swayed behind her. At the foot of the porch steps I stared at the ground and said, “Mildred says I owe her a dollar.”
“Do tell.” Grandma stroked her big cheek. She looked down at me over her spectacles. “You run up quite a big bill for your first day. A buck’s a week’s wages around here. Two weeks’ for a Burdick.”
Mildred stood her ground behind me. I could feel her breath on my neck. She was tough. Not too bright, but tough.
“Well, come on in the house,” Grandma said. “We’ll talk it over.” She turned back to the screen door. “Get them boots off.” She pointed to Mildred’s. “They’re caked with something I don’t want on my kitchen floor.”
Mildred’s eyes flashed two colors. But Grandma was bigger than she was. She squatted to unlace her boots. Then she stood them by the back door.
We went inside. Without her boots, Mildred had lost some steam. Her socks were more hole than cotton. This may have been the first clean kitchen of her experience. She looked around, wary. But not wary enough.
“How about a glass of buttermilk to wet your whistles?” Grandma had been making cottage cheese. A big cloth sack of clabber dripped into a bowl. She waved us into chairs.
I could take buttermilk or leave it. Mildred guzzled hers. It left her with a white mustache, and a little more of her authority slipped away. Grandma cut us two big squares of cold corn bread out of a pan.
“How’s your Grandma Idella?” Grandma said to Mildred, friendly as anything. “I hear she’s had the dropsy and she’s too puny to get off the bed.”
“She’s poorly,” Mildred admitted. “She’s pinin’ and fixin’ to give out.”
“Poor old soul,” Grandma said. “I’ll get a jar of my huckleberry jam out of the cellar for her. I expect she can keep that down.”
Grandma’s spectacled gaze grazed me as she sailed out the back door. She was up to something. She didn’t have to go outdoors to go down her cellar. The cellar door was right behind my chair.
Mildred wolfed the corn bread, though she’d eaten Ina-Rae’s lunch.
Grandma was soon back, without the huckleberry jam. I don’t remember her ever making huckleberry jam.
“And is your paw still in the penitentiary?” she asked Mildred.
“He was framed,” Mildred mumbled, sulky.
“Oh, I guess them sheep off the Bowman farm found their own way into your pen.” Grandma stood at her ease before the black iron range. It was her usual spot. The linoleum there was worn to the floorboards.
“Mildred’s paw’s a famous horse trader in these parts,” Grandma explained to me, “when he’s not in the clink. People still talk about how he sold that half-dead nag to Old Man Nyquist. Mildred’s paw fed a live eel down that plug horse’s throat. It was lively as a young colt for the time it took to sell it to Nyquist. Of course, when the eel died, that old crowbait nag lost all its get-up-an’-go. Nyquist had to send it to the scavenger.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Mildred with her mouth full.
But I was suddenly arrested by a sight that only Grandma and I saw. Mildred couldn’t see it. Her back was to the door. Her big gray horse was trotting away, past the porch, free as air. Tied around its neck were Mildred’s boots. I nearly fell off the chair in surprise. But Grandma gazed into space, seeming to count the cadavers on her flypaper strip.
Presently she said to Mildred, “We’ll talk about that dollar another time. You better get on your way. You’ve got five miles of bad road ahead of you. You won’t be home till pretty nearly midnight.”
Mildred looked up. Whatever she saw in Grandma’s eyes brought her out of her chair. It tipped over behind her. Mildred pounded sock-footed out onto the back porch. The horse was gone. When she grabbed for her boots, they were gone too. She tore off the porch, heading for the road, looking both ways. But the horse was out of sight. Grandma latched the screen door behind her.
I’d never budged. Grandma righted Mildred’s chair and sat down, to take the weight off her feet. Her thoughts seemed to wander, and she was using a toothpick. Grandma carried a toothpick hidden in her mouth. She could flip it forward with her tongue to pick her teeth.
At last she said, “Them Burdicks isn’t worth the powder and shot to blow them up. They’re like a pack of hound dogs. They’ll chase livestock, suck eggs, and lick the skillet. And steal? They’d steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke.”
“Grandma,” I said, “you’ll get me killed. She wants a dollar off me. Instead, you untied her horse and slung her boots around its neck and she has to walk home.”
“Barefoot,” Grandma said.
“Grandma, tomorrow at school she’ll take it out of my hide.”
“She won’t be in school tomorrow,” Grandma said.
“I don’t see why not. She’ll ride to school tomorrow just to skin me alive.”
“No, she won’t,” Grandma said. “That horse went home. I know that horse. It belongs to the Sensenbaughs. They live seven miles in the other direction, way over there past Milmine. A horse’ll go home if it gets the chance.”
“You mean—”
“Mildred’s paw stole every horse he ever had. And he won’t steal another till he gets out of the penitentiary. I don’t picture Mildred walkin’ five miles both ways for an education.”
“... Barefoot,” I said.
“Barefoot,” Grandma said. “I can’t fight all your battles for you,
but I can give you a level start.”
A silence fell while I thought that over. Then I said, “And you acted real nice to her too, Grandma. You gave her buttermilk and that big slab of corn bread.”
“Oh well.” Grandma waved herself away. “Didn’t want to send her off hungry. I knew she had a long walk ahead of her.”
We sat there at the kitchen table, Grandma and I, while the shadows crept across the linoleum.
In this busy day I hadn’t had time to be homesick. But I thought about my brother. Joey. Always before, he’d come down here to Grandma’s with me, and stuck up for me. Now he was out west, planting trees, living in a tent. I thought about Joey, and Grandma was thinking about him too. I could tell.
Then I smacked my forehead, remembering Bootsie. “Grandma! Where’s Bootsie?”
“Who?”
“Bootsie, Grandma. My cat.”
“I won’t have a cat in the house,” she said. “They shed. She’s out in the cobhouse where she belongs.”
I sank in the chair. “Grandma, she won’t know where she is. She’ll be scared. She’ll run away. She’ll try to go home like Mildred’s horse.”
“No, she won’t,” Grandma said. “I buttered her paws.”
“You what?”
“I rubbed butter on all four of her paws. That’s what you do with a cat in a new place. By the time they’ve licked off all that butter, they’re right at home. Works every time.”
“Oh, Grandma,” I said, too worried to stir.
Now it was nearly evening. The sun setting down the west window glinted off Grandma’s spectacles. The toothpick made little lazy revolutions between her wrinkled lips. Something thumped out on the porch. They’d brought my trunk from the depot, and what a final sound that thump was.
Then Grandma said in a thoughtful voice, “And you better settle in too, girl. Or I’ll butter your paws.”
I just sat there without a sigh left in me. But I was past bawling now as Grandma began to edge out of her chair. “How about some supper? My stomach’s flapping against my backbone,” she said. “If I don’t eat, I get cranky.”
And heaven knows, we couldn’t have that.
Vittles and Vengeance
I little knew what a big holiday Halloween was in a town like Grandma’s. Up in Chicago we didn’t make much of it. A little trick-or-treating in a sheet. Maybe a cardboard jack-o’-lantern from Woolworth’s with a candle inside if your apartment windows faced the street. But that was about the size of it.
Down here it went on for weeks, worse on the weekends. By the time Columbus Day was over, half the privies in town were uprooted and laid flat. One morning we came to school to find a complete old-fashioned buggy up on the bell tower, swinging from an axle.
I expected Grandma to be a target. Old people in big houses were. But then Grandma wasn’t just any old person. What the Halloweeners didn’t know was that Halloween was her favorite holiday. And being mostly boys, they didn’t seem to remember this lesson from year to year.
The fall was Grandma’s favorite season. She liked laying in her supplies for cold weather. As soon as the first hard frost struck her garden, she foraged farther from home. She was like a big, bushy-tailed squirrel in an apron, gathering against the long winter.
Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and there was to be a school party on Saturday night for the entire community. It was a typical school plan to keep us out of mischief. When Grandma heard about it, she said, “If they bob for apples, bring home two or three. We’ll bake ’em with brown sugar.”
Being fifteen, I didn’t tell Grandma any more about high school than I could help. But she always knew everything anyway, so I showed her a notice from the principal, Mr. Fluke. The grammar in it was good, so Miss Butler must have ghostwritten it. She asked parents to provide party refreshments. In those times people turned out in droves if there was anything to eat.
“Vittles,” Grandma said, scanning Miss Butler’s appeal. “That’ll mean pies.”
“Gooseberry?” I asked. She was famous for her gooseberry pie.
But she waved me away. “You don’t make a pie out of canned fruit until the dead of winter when you don’t have any choice.” She spoke of the winter ahead as a war she’d be waging. I must have pictured the two of us in an igloo, spearing fish through the ice. “Punkin and pecan,” she said, “and we’re going to be busy night and day. Girl, I hope you remember something about rolling out pie crust.”
We were just finished with supper. Now I slipped away from the table with a crumbling baking powder biscuit in my pocket. Grandma and I had been having a battle about Bootsie. Grandma had never heard of cat food in a can. And there were precious few table scraps around here. She said cats were natural hunters and Bootsie could find her own meals. Cats are like the Burdicks, she said. They’d eat anything they could bite.
It was true. Bootsie had begun to forget she was a city cat. She’d settled down in the cobhouse and was growing sleek and round from a diet of birds and field mice and things I didn’t want to think about.
But I hated to see her get this independent. Most evenings I’d sneak a treat from my plate out to her. She often waited on the porch with her head cocked. Grandma knew. She had eyes in the back of her head.
Tonight, though, Bootsie wasn’t on the porch. There I was with a baking powder biscuit coming apart in my pocket. Then I heard a little sound, over by the spirea bushes. It was a clunking sound, followed by a small, piteous cry.
I hoped it wasn’t Bootsie and knew it was. I strained to see across the dark yard. Two green eyes caught the light from the kitchen. I called her and she came, or tried to. Bootsie bounded forward, then fell back and ran a circle around herself. I was down in the yard now, scooping her up. She clawed my shoulder and quivered. When I lifted her, a nasty old rusted-out tin can was tied tight to her tail by a length of twine.
Though she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen, I marched inside, holding her high. “Grandma! Look at this.” The can swung below Bootsie, and her tail looked all pinched. “If this is Halloween around here,” I said, “I don’t like it.”
Grandma just pursed her lips and took a pair of shears to the twine. “Now turn her out,” she said, pointing to the door. Grandma went back to the range to stir something. The kitchen was filling up with a terrible smell. Reluctantly, I spilled Bootsie out onto the back porch. When I turned around, the smell from the pan on the stove was enough to skin my eyes.
“Grandma, what is that?”
“Glue. Best glue you ever used, better than store-bought. It’ll bond wood to wood, metal to metal, and stay stuck till kingdom come.” She turned, gasping, from the stove. Her spectacles had steamed up, and her cheeks were wet. “We’ll need some picture wire.” She nodded to a drawer. “And a hammer. Not the tack hammer. The big one. And there’s a railroad spike around here somewheres.”
I knew not to ask. It was just better to go along with her.
By and by, we were trooping off the back porch, bundled up. I wore my plaid coat from last winter, which was short in the sleeves. It was a frosty night, with a ring around the moon. Grandma and I were shadows casting shadows down her back walk, past her sleeping garden and the clothesline.
“Busy, busy, busy,” Grandma muttered to herself. “Too much to do.” She carried the pan of glue. I carried the rest.
The cobhouse where Bootsie lived stood facing the privy at the end of the back walk. A Japanese lantern vine that grew up over the privy rattled in the night wind. Grandma’s privy was among the last left standing. The Halloweeners had struck as near as next door. That privy was just kindling now, scattered. And a plank with two holes in it, hanging down from the fence.
Setting down the smoldering glue, Grandma took the spike out of my hand. With two almighty hammer blows she drove it into the ground beside the cobhouse door. Winding the wire around the spike, she stretched it tight across the walk to tie it to the trunk of the Japanese lantern vine, about five inches off the ground. Sh
e was grunting and bent double.
“Find us a couple crates to sit on in there.” She nodded to the cobhouse. “This could take a while.”
The cobhouse was where Grandpa Dowdel had stored everything he’d ever owned. There was just room enough for Grandma and me on our crates, inside by the doorway. The pan of glue cooled at her feet. Bootsie found us. Though she didn’t like the glue smell, she sprang onto my lap, nuzzling for the baking powder biscuit. I doled it out to her and held her close to keep my hands warm.
It was so quiet, you could hear Bootsie chew, and from miles away came the mournful whistle of a freight train. But we were silent as the tomb. Nothing could seem more deserted than this cobhouse, that privy.
At last we heard them. Bumbling boys in a bunch, making their way down past the garden. Oh, how quiet they thought they were being, with their boot heels ringing on the walk and their noisy breathing. I tried to count heads, though it was too dark to see whose. There may have been only three, though they seemed like more. In my lap Bootsie was as still as a little statue. Beside me, Grandma was at one with the darkness.
We no sooner saw the first boy than the invisible wire caught him at the ankle. He pitched forward, and a word I can’t repeat burst out of him. He fell like a tree and measured his full length on the concrete walk. Nothing broke his fall but his nose.
There was scrambling. The boys behind him tried to stop, not knowing where their leader had gone. They only wondered for a moment.
Grandma lunged. As big as the cobhouse doorway, she surged through it. Moonlight struck her snow-white hair, and she looked eight feet tall. She’d have given a coroner a coronary. As the fallen boy raised his dazed head, she turned the pan of glue over on it. The glue was cool now and would set later.
He screamed, of course, and this too panicked the others. They ran into each other and the cobhouse wall. They tried to get away from Grandma. They may have thought she was a restless spirit. In a way, she was. They jibbered.
