Past Perfect, Present Tense

by Richard Peck

  “Who sent you to me?”

  “I’m going door-to-door, ma’am. You know how you ladies like to talk. Bless your hearts, you’d all talk the hind leg off a mule.”

  Mary Alice and I both stared at that. We figured Grandma would grab up her broom to swat him off the porch. She could make short work of peddlers even when they weren’t lippy. And tramps never marked her fence. But to our surprise she swept open the screen door and stepped out on the back porch. You didn’t get inside her house even if you knew her. I followed and so did Mary Alice once she was sure the snaggletoothed tom wasn’t lurking around out there, waiting to pounce.

  “You a newspaper reporter?” she said. “Peoria?” It was the flashy clothes, but he looked surprised. “What they been telling you?”

  “Looks like I got a good story by the tail,” he said. “‘Last of the Old Owlhoot Gunslingers Goes to a Pauper’s Grave.’ That kind of angle. Ma’am, I wonder if you could help me flesh out the story some.”

  “Well, I got flesh to spare,” Grandma said mildly. “Who’s been talking to you?”

  “It was mainly an elderly lady—”

  “Ugly as sin, calls herself Wilcox?” Grandma said. “She’s been in the state hospital for the insane until just here lately, but as a reporter I guess you nosed that out.”

  Mary Alice nudged me hard, and the reporter’s eyes widened.

  “They tell you how Shotgun come by his name?”

  “Opinions seem to vary, ma’am.”

  “Ah well, fame is fleeting,” Grandma said. “He got it in the Civil War.”

  The reporter’s hand hovered over his breast pocket where a notepad stuck out.

  “Oh yes. Shotgun went right through the war with the Illinois Volunteers. Shiloh in the spring of sixty-two, and he was with U. S. Grant when Vicksburg fell. That’s where he got his name. Grant give it to him, in fact. Shotgun didn’t hold with government-issue firearms. He shot rebels with his old Remington pump-action that he’d used to kill quail back here at home.”

  Now Mary Alice was yanking on my shirttail. We knew kids lie all the time, but Grandma was no kid, and she could tell some whoppers. Of course the reporter had been lied to big-time up at the cafe, but Grandma’s lies were more interesting, even historical. They made Shotgun look better while they left Effie Wilcox in the dust.

  “He was always a crack shot,” she said, winding down. “Come home from the war with a line of medals bigger than his chest.”

  “And yet he died penniless,” the reporter said in a thoughtful voice.

  “Oh well, he’d sold off them medals and give the money to war widows and orphans.”

  A change crossed the reporter’s narrow face. Shotgun had gone from kill-crazy gunslinger to war hero marksman. Philanthropist, even. He fumbled his notepad out and was scribbling. He thought he’d hit pay dirt with Grandma. “It’s all a matter of record,” she said. “You could look it up.”

  He was ready to wire in a new story: “Civil War Hero Handpicked by U. S. Grant called to the Great Campground in the Sky.” Something like that. “And he never married?”

  “Never did,” Grandma said. “He broke Effie Wilcox’s heart. She’s bitter still, as you see.”

  “And now he goes to a pauper’s grave with none to mark his passing,” the reporter said, which may have been a sample of his writing style.

  “They tell you that?” Grandma said. “They’re pulling your leg, sonny. You drop by The Coffee Pot and tell them you heard that Shotgun’s being buried from my house with full honors. He’ll spend his last night above ground in my front room, and you’re invited.”

  The reporter backed down the porch stairs, staggering under all this new material. “Much obliged, ma’am.”

  “Happy to help,” Grandma said.

  Mary Alice had turned loose of my shirttail. What little we knew about grown-ups never seemed to cover Grandma. She turned on us. “Now I’ve got to change my shoes and walk all the way up to the lumberyard in this heat,” she said, as if she hadn’t brought it all on herself. Up at the lumberyard they’d be knocking together Shotgun Cheatham’s coffin and sending the bill to the county, and Grandma had to tell them to bring that coffin to her house, with Shotgun in it.

  * * *

  By nightfall a green pine coffin stood on two sawhorses in the bay window of the front room, and people milled in the yard. They couldn’t see Shotgun from there because the coffin lid blocked the view. Besides, a heavy gauze hung from the open lid and down over the front of the coffin to veil him. Shotgun hadn’t been exactly fresh when they discovered his body. Grandma had flung open every window, but there was a peculiar smell in the room. I’d only had one look at him when they’d carried in the coffin, and that was enough. I’ll tell you just two things about him. He didn’t have his teeth in, and he was wearing bib overalls.

  The people in the yard still couldn’t believe Grandma was holding open house. This didn’t stop the reporter, who was haunting the parlor, looking for more flesh to add to his story. And it didn’t stop Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, who came leading her father, an ancient codger half her size in full Civil War Union Blue.

  “We are here to pay our respects at this sad time,” Mrs. Weidenbach said when Grandma let them in. “When I told Daddy that Shotgun had been decorated by U. S. Grant and wounded three times at Bull Run, it brought it all back to him, and we had to come.” Her old daddy wore a forage cap and a decoration from the Grand Army of the Republic, and he seemed to have no idea where he was. She led him up to the coffin, where they admired the flowers. Grandma had planted a pitcher of glads from her garden at either end of the pine box. In each pitcher she’d stuck an American flag.

  A few more people willing to brave Grandma came and went, but finally we were down to the reporter, who’d settled into the best chair, still nosing for news. Then who appeared at the front door but Mrs. Effie Wilcox, in a hat.

  “Mrs. Dowdel, I’ve come to set with you overnight and see our brave old soldier through his Last Watch.”

  In those days people sat up with a corpse through the final night before burial. I’d have bet money Grandma wouldn’t let Mrs. Wilcox in for a quick look, let alone overnight. But of course Grandma was putting on the best show possible to pull wool over the reporter’s eyes. Little though she thought of townspeople, she thought less of strangers. Grandma waved Mrs. Wilcox inside, and in she came, stared at the blank white gauze, and said, “Don’t he look natural?”

  Then she drew up a chair next to the reporter. He flinched because he had it on good authority that she’d just been let out of the insane asylum. “Warm, ain’t it?” she said straight at him, but looking everywhere.

  The crowd outside finally dispersed. Mary Alice and I hung at the edge of the room, too curious to be anywhere else.

  “If you’re here for the long haul,” Grandma said to the reporter, “how about a beer?” He looked encouraged, and Grandma left him to Mrs. Wilcox, which was meant as a punishment. She came back with three of her home brews, cellar-cool. She brewed beer to drink herself, but these three bottles were to see the reporter through the night. She wouldn’t have expected her worst enemy, Effie Wilcox, to drink alcohol in front of a man.

  In normal circumstances the family recalls stories about the departed to pass the long night hours. But these circumstances weren’t normal, and quite a bit had already been recalled about Shotgun Cheatham anyway.

  Only a single lamp burned, and as midnight drew on, the glads drooped in their pitchers. I was wedged in a corner, beginning to doze, and Mary Alice was sound asleep on a throw rug. After the second beer, the reporter lolled, visions of Shotgun’s Civil War glories no doubt dancing in his head. You could hear the tick of the kitchen clock. Grandma’s chin would drop, then jerk back. Mrs. Wilcox had been humming “Rock of Ages,” but tapered off after “let me hide myself in thee.”

  Then there was the quietest sound you ever heard. Somewhere between a rustle and a whisper. It brough
t me around, and I saw Grandma sit forward and cock her head. I blinked to make sure I was awake, and the whole world seemed to listen. Not a leaf trembled outside.

  But the gauze that hung down over the open coffin moved. Twitched.

  Except for Mary Alice, we all saw it. The reporter sat bolt upright, and Mrs. Wilcox made a little sound.

  Then nothing.

  Then the gauze rippled as if a hand had passed across it from the other side, and in one place it wrinkled into a wad as if somebody had snagged it. As if a feeble hand had reached up from the coffin depths in one last desperate attempt to live before the dirt was shoveled in.

  Every hair on my head stood up.

  “Naw,” Mrs. Wilcox said, strangling. She pulled back in her chair, and her hat went forward. “Naw!”

  The reporter had his chair arms in a death grip. “Sweet mother of—”

  But Grandma rocketed out of her chair. “Whoa, Shotgun!” she bellowed. “You’ve had your time, boy. You don’t get no more!”

  She galloped out of the room faster than I’d ever seen her move. The reporter was riveted, and Mrs. Wilcox was sinking fast.

  Quicker than it takes to tell, Grandma was back and already raised to her aproned shoulder was the twelve-gauge Winchester from behind the woodbox. She swung it wildly around the room, skimming Mrs. Wilcox’s hat, and took aim at the gauze that draped the yawning coffin. Then she squeezed off a round.

  I thought that sound would bring the house down. I couldn’t hear right for a week. Then Grandma roared out, “Rest in peace, I tell you, you old—” Then she let fly with the other barrel.

  The reporter came out of the chair and whipped completely around in a circle. Beer bottles went everywhere. The straight route to the front door was in Grandma’s line of fire, and he didn’t have the presence of mind to realize she’d already discharged both barrels. He went out a side window, headfirst, leaving his hat and his notepad behind. Which he feared more, the living dead or Grandma’s aim, he didn’t tarry to tell. Mrs. Wilcox was on her feet, hollering, “The dead is walking, and Mrs. Dowdel’s gunning for me!” She cut and ran out the door and into the night.

  When the screen door snapped to behind her, silence fell. Mary Alice hadn’t moved. The first explosion had blasted her awake, but she naturally thought that Grandma had killed her, so she didn’t bother to budge. She says the whole experience gave her nightmares for years after.

  A burned-powder haze hung in the room, cutting the smell of Shotgun Cheatham. The white gauze was black rags now, and Grandma had blown the lid clear of the coffin. She’d have blown out all three windows in the bay, except they were open. As it was, she’d pitted her woodwork bad and topped the snowball bushes outside. But apart from scattered shot, she hadn’t disfigured Shotgun Cheatham any more than he already was.

  Grandma stood there savoring the silence. Then she turned toward the kitchen with the twelve-gauge loose in her hand. “Time you kids was in bed,” she said as she trudged past us.

  Apart from Grandma herself, I was the only one who’d seen her big old snaggletoothed tomcat streak out of the coffin and over the windowsill when she let fire. And I suppose she’d seen him climb in, which gave her ideas. It was the cat, sitting smug on Shotgun Cheatham’s breathless chest, who’d batted at the gauze the way a cat will. And he sure lit out the way he’d come when Grandma fired just over his ragged ears, as he’d probably used up eight lives already.

  The cat in the coffin gave Grandma Dowdel her chance. She never had any time for Effie Wilcox, whose tongue flapped at both ends, but she had even less for newspaper reporters who think your business is theirs. Courtesy of the cat, she’d fired a round, so to speak, in the direction of each.

  Though she never gloated, she looked satisfied. It certainly fleshed out her reputation and gave people new reason to leave her in peace. The story of Shotgun Cheatham’s last night above ground kept The Coffee Pot Cafe fully engaged for the rest of that long summer. It was a story that grew in the telling in one of those little towns where there’s always time to ponder all the different kinds of truth.

  The Special Powers of Blossom Culp

  My name is Blossom Culp, and I’m ten years old, to the best of my mama’s recollection.

  I call 1900 the year of my birth, but Mama claims to have no idea of the day. Mama doesn’t hold with birthdays. She says they make her feel old. This also saves her giving me a present. You could go through the courthouse down at Sikeston, Missouri, with a fine-tooth comb without turning up my records. But I must have been born because here I am.

  Since Mama is hard to overlook, I will just mention her now. She doesn’t know her birthday either but claims to be twenty-nine years old. She has only three teeth in her head, but they are up front, so they make a good showing. Her inky hair flows over her bent shoulders and far down her back. Whenever she appeared in daylight down at Sikeston, horses reared. Mama is a sight.

  But she’s a woman of wisdom and wonderful when it comes to root mixtures, forbidden knowledge, and other people’s poultry. We could live off the land, though the trouble is, it’s always somebody else’s land. Like many of nature’s creatures, Mama goes about her work at night. Get your corn in early, or Mama will have our share. Plant your tomatoes up by the house, or Mama will take them off you by the bushel. She likes her eggs fresh too.

  A moonless night suits her best; then off she goes down the hedgerows with a croaker sack flung over her humped shoulder. But nobody’s ever caught her. “I can outrun a dawg,” says Mama.

  It was another of her talents that got us chased out of Sikeston. To hear her tell it, Mama has the Second Sight. For ready money she’ll tell your fortune, find lost articles, see through walls, and call up the departed. She can read tea leaves, a pack of cards, your palm, a crystal ball. It doesn’t matter to Mama. But because Sikeston was a backward place and narrow in its thinking, her profession was against the law. So her and me had to hotfoot it out of town two jumps ahead of a sheriff’s posse.

  Mama said that fate was leading her to our next home place. But we’d have hopped a freight in any direction. Aboard a swaying cattle car, Mama grew thoughtful and pulled on her long chin.

  “The farther north we get,” she said, “the more progressive. Wherever we light, you’ll be goin’ to school.” She shifted a plug of Bull Durham from one cheek to the other. If Mama had ever been to school herself, she’d have mentioned it. About all she can read is tea leaves.

  “I been to school before, Mama,” I reminded her. Down at Sikeston, I’d dropped into the grade school occasionally. Though when I dropped out again, I wasn’t missed.

  “I mean you’ll be goin’ to school regular,” Mama said. “I won’t have the law on me—believe it.”

  So when at last we came to rest at the town of Bluff City, I knew school was in my future without even a glimpse into Mama’s crystal ball. I well recall the day I strolled into the Horace Mann School in Bluff City, wearing the same duds from when me and Mama had dropped off a cattle car of the Wabash Railroad.

  “Yewww,” said many of the girls in the school yard, giving me a wide berth. It was no better inside. I was sent to the principal before I had time to break a rule. She was a woman tall as a tree named Miss Mae Spaulding.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, looking down at me, “we’re going to have to find you a comb.”

  I was small for ten but old for my years. Miss Spaulding grasped this and assigned me to fourth grade. She took me there herself, shooing me on ahead like a chicken. The teacher, name of Miss Cartwright, took a gander at me and said, “Oh, my stars.”

  “Perhaps you’d have a spare handkerchief to loan Blossom,” the principal said to Miss Cartwright over my head.

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve and noticed all the eyes of the fourth grade were boring holes in me. The boys’ eyes were round with amazement. The girls’ eyes were mean slits.

  “I guess we had better find Blossom a seat,” Miss Cartwright said as Miss Spaulding beat
a hasty retreat.

  A big girl reared up out of her desk. She wore a bow the size of a kite on the back of her head. “She’ll not be sitting next to me!” she sang out, and flopped back.

  Her name turned out to be Letty Shambaugh, and once again I didn’t need Mama’s Second Sight to see I had met an enemy for life.

  Miss Cartwright cleared her throat and said, “Boys and girls, we have a new class member. I will ask her to introduce herself.”

  I looked out across the fourth grade, and they seemed capable of anything. Still, I stood my ground. “My name is Blossom Culp, and I hail from down at Sikeston, Missouri.”

  “Hillbillies,” Letty Shambaugh hissed to the girls around her, “or worse.”

  “Me and Mama have relocated to Bluff City on account of her business.”

  “And what is your mother’s business?” Miss Cartwright inquired.

  “Oh, well, shoot,” I says, “Mama is well known for her herbal cures and fortune-telling. She can heal warts too. There’s gypsy blood in our family.”

  Letty Shambaugh smirked. “Ah,” says Miss Cartwright. “Are you an only child, Blossom?”

  “I am now,” I said. “I was born one-half of a pair of Siamese twins, but my twin had to be hacked off my side so I alone could live.”

  “She lies!” Letty Shambaugh called out, though all the boys were interested in my story.

  Miss Cartwright had now pulled back to the blackboard and seemed to cling to the chalk tray. “You may take your seat, Blossom.” She pointed to the rear of the room.

  I didn’t mind it on the back row. But as the weeks passed, the novelty of going to school wore thin. My reading wasn’t up to fourth-grade standard either. Still, when we had to rise and read aloud from a library book, I did well. Holding a book up, I’d tell a story I thought of on the spot.

  “Lies, lies,” Letty would announce, “nothing but lies!” Still, Miss Cartwright was often so fascinated, she didn’t stop me.