Past Perfect, Present Tense

by Richard Peck

  Then one day she told us that Letty would be having her birthday party on school time. “It is not usual to have a birthday party in class,” Miss Cartwright said, “but we are making an exception of Letty.”

  People were always making an exception of Letty. Her paw was the president of the Board of Education. “Mrs. Shambaugh has very kindly offered to provide a cake,” Miss Cartwright said, “and ice-cream punch.”

  At recess I was in the girls’ restroom, which has partitions for modesty. From my stall I eavesdropped on Letty talking to the bunch of girls she rules: Tess and Bess, the Beasley twins; Nola Nirider; and Maisie Markham.

  “Now shut up and listen,” Letty told them. “I am looking for some first-rate presents from you-all for my birthday. Don’t get me any of that five-and-dime stuff.”

  I was so interested in Letty’s commandments that I leaned on the door of my stall and staggered out into full view.

  “Oh, there you are, Blossom,” Letty sniffed. “Since you do nothing but tell lies and snoop, I’ll thank you not to give me a present at all. You are a poor girl and can’t afford it. Besides, I want nothing from the likes of you.”

  The bell rang, and they all flounced off like a gaggle of geese. But Letty turned back to fire a final warning at me. “And don’t let me catch you spying on us again, Blossom!”

  You won’t, I said, but only to myself.

  I sat up that night, waiting for Mama to come home. We’d taken up residence in an abandoned structure over past the streetcar tracks. It must have been midnight before Mama came in and eased her croaker sack down.

  Then she busied herself shaking out everything she’d harvested from nearby gardens. From the look of some of it, she’d detoured past the dump. It was late in the season, so all there was to eat was a handful of pale parsnips.

  “Well, Mama, I’ve got me a problem,” I told her. “A stuck-up girl at school is having a birthday party, and I mean to give her a present like anybody else.”

  Mama surveyed her night’s haul. “See anything here you can use?”

  She held up a lady’s whalebone corset straight off the trash heap and busted beyond repair. Besides, it wouldn’t go halfway around Letty. The rest of the stuff was worse, except for a nice hatbox only a little dented with the tissue paper still inside. When I reached for it, Mama only shrugged, and picked between two of her three teeth.

  The school days droned on, but I kept my wits about me. In one of my read-alouds, I went too far. Holding up a library copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I told the class about the time Mama came across the severed head of a woman and how Mama could identify the murderer with her Second Sight.

  “A pack of lies!” Letty bawled out. “And disgusting!”

  “That will do, Blossom,” Miss Cartwright said in a weary voice. So after that, I had little to occupy myself with but to lie low and snoop on other people’s business.

  On the afternoon of Letty’s party, a cake was wheeled in as large and pink as Letty herself. The classroom was stacked with tastefully wrapped presents, and no learning was done that afternoon. Miss Cartwright hung at the edge while Letty was the center of attention, where she likes to be.

  We played some games too childish to interest me, but I managed three slabs of cake and copped an extra slice for Mama. Then it was time for the presents.

  “Oh heavens, you shouldn’t have!” says Letty, her pudgy fingers fluttering over the vast heap. “Land sakes, I don’t know which one to open first!”

  “Start with this one.” I nudged the hatbox toward her with the toe of my shoe. I’d dressed it up with a bow I found in the school yard and some gold star stickers I’d come across in a teacher’s desk.

  Miss Cartwright was standing by. Though strict, she sometimes eyed me sympathetically, though it might only have been pity. “Yes, Letty,” she said. “Start with Blossom’s present.”

  So Letty had to. She shook the box but heard nothing. She lifted the lid and ran a hand through the tissue paper. “But there’s nothing in it,” she gasped, shooting me a dangerous look.

  Some of the boys snickered, but the girls just pursed up their lips. “Oh, dear,” Miss Cartwright remarked. Now Letty had turned the hatbox upside down. The tissue paper dropped out and with it a small note I’d hand-lettered. She read it aloud:

  To Letty,

  Since I am too poor to buy you a present, I will share with you my own personal Gift.

  Believe it.

  Blossom Culp

  Letty glanced longingly at her other presents. “What is this so-called personal Gift of yours, Blossom?”

  “Just a little demonstration of the Special Powers I inherited from my mama,” I replied.

  Letty shook a fist at me. “Blossom, you aren’t going to ruin my party by showing off and telling lies!”

  “For example,” I said, cool as a cucumber, “before you even open up your other presents, I can tell what’s in them with my Inner Eye. It’s a Gift, and I have it down pat.”

  The girls were fixing to turn on me, but a boy said, “Then do it.”

  I could read the card on Nola Nirider’s. “Now, you take Nola’s present.” I pointed it out. “No, I don’t want to touch it. Just give me a minute.” I let my head loll. Then I let my eyes roll back in my head. It was a ghastly sight, and the class gasped. In a voice faint and far-off I said, “Within the wrappings, I see . . . a woman! She is a dainty creature cut in two at the waist!” I let my eyes roll back in place and looked around. “What did I say?”

  Letty was already tearing open Nola’s present. She pulled out a dainty china powder box in the shape of a lady. It was in two parts. The lid was the upper half. The boys blinked, and the girls looked worried.

  Reading the card on Maisie’s present from afar, I said, “Now, you take that one from Maisie Markham.” And back flipped my eyes, and my head bobbed around till it like to fall off. “Deep within that fancy package,” I moaned weirdly, “is a sealed bottle of apple-blossom toilet water—retailing at seventy-nine cents. I sense it with my Inner Nose.”

  Letty ripped open the box, coming up with that selfsame bottle of toilet water. “How am I doin’?” I asked the class.

  It was like that with Tess’s brush-and-comb set and Bess’s four hair ribbons in rainbow hues. My eyes rolled back so often, showing my whites, that I thought I’d never get them straight in their sockets.

  By now Letty sat sprawled in a heap of wrapping paper. The tears streamed down her red face. She was clouding up and ready to squall and had to stand to stamp her foot. “You have ruined my party with your showing off, Blossom. I knew you would, and you have!” She pounded out of the room before she even got to any presents from the boys, which was just as well. The other girls followed her as usual.

  Now I was left with the boys, who showed me new respect, unsure of my Special Powers. But then the bell rang, and they trooped out, taking final swipes at the remains of the cake.

  “One moment, Blossom,” Miss Cartwright said before I could make it to the door. “Could it be as you say—that you have . . . unearthly powers? Or could it merely be that you eavesdropped in the restroom often enough to hear those girls telling each other what they were giving Letty—and then you added that business with your eyes?”

  Her chalky hand rested on my shoulder. “No, don’t tell me,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”

  I was ready to cut out, but Miss Cartwright continued. “It has not taken you long to make a name for yourself at Horace Mann School. You will never be popular. But I have hopes for your future, Blossom. You will go far in your own peculiar way.”

  And I only nodded, as it’s never wise to disagree with a teacher. Then she turned me loose, and I went on my way.

  By Far the Worst Pupil at Long Point School

  When we were kids, we always ate our Christmas dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s, who I thought had been around since the Ice Age. They lived in that little frame house back in the fields past Long Point School. Of
course house and school are long vanished now, gone to wherever memories go.

  Grandma could do some cooking once she got that old iron stove fired up. Come Christmas day, every chair around her table was filled. Uncle Billy never missed. Being a bachelor, he made the rounds of other people’s tables for all his holiday meals and most Sunday dinners. “He can smell a turkey roasting from the other end of the county,” Grandma said.

  Some people welcomed Uncle Billy for the stories he told. Other people put up with him. Grandma put up with him. She was his big sister, though a quarter his size.

  Since Uncle Billy had never married or left the district, nothing had happened to him as a grown-up. All his stories were about the days of yore when he was a boy. Trying to picture Uncle Billy and Grandpa and Grandma as young was more than I could manage. They all three looked to me like they’d been whittled out of used lumber.

  Uncle Billy was full of stories, but a lot of us grandkids had never heard Grandpa speak. Certain people claimed the last words Grandpa ever uttered were at his wedding to Grandma when he said, “I do.”

  “Who wants more oyster dressing?” Grandma said.

  “I do!” Uncle Billy said, which made us all look at him, then at Grandpa. Grandpa blinked.

  “Who besides Billy?” said Grandma from the kitchen door.

  After the turkey and trimmings came the pies and the suet pudding with hard sauce, and finally a bowl of fruit nobody touched. Only then did Uncle Billy ease back from the table. When he undid the top button on his pants and the last button of his vest, we knew we were in for a story.

  He said all his stories were to benefit us young ones. He put them together like quilts, with scenes from earlier tales stitched into new patterns. “Oh, you talk about strict,” he said, letting out another button. “You don’t know what strict is, without my sister for your teacher.”

  He glanced at Grandma, who said, “It wasn’t any picnic for me either, and for eight dollars a month.”

  We’d heard about how Grandma had been the teacher at Long Point School when she was still only a teenaged girl herself.

  “I’d just put my toe over the line a very little bit,” said Billy, “and she’d come down on me like the wolf on the fold.”

  “You couldn’t help being a slow thinker, Billy,” Grandma observed, “but the least you could do was behave.”

  “She like to wear me out with that paddle. It hung on the wall right there within her reach. Oh, she was quick with that paddle! I couldn’t sit all the way down without pain until I was right at thirty years of age.”

  “I thought it would take you that long to get through eighth grade,” Grandma remarked.

  “She’d even whup a girl if that girl got sassy with her. She whupped Gladys Birdwell.”

  Grandma never really reminisced, but now she nodded. “I have an idea there are still marks on Gladys that don’t show in daylight.”

  “She’d paddle a boy half again her size,” Uncle Billy recalled. “But of course it didn’t work with Charlie. Nothing fazed Charlie. He was by far the worst pupil at Long Point School.”

  Grandma sat with us now, around the remains of Christmas dinner. “No,” she admitted, “the paddle didn’t work on Charlie.”

  “We had us two privies,” Uncle Billy explained. “One for the boys, one for the girls.”

  We young ones watched the buttons on his straining vest. After such a meal if one of those buttons popped off, it could put your eye out.

  “And Charlie was sweet on some girl. Was it Gladys Birdwell?”

  “It was Estelle Grub,” Grandma said.

  “Anyway, Charlie’s notion of getting a girl’s attention was to steal her stocking cap and throw it down the girls’ privy. Just the idea of a boy going into the girls’ privy was enough to call out the National Guard at that time. But would that faze Charlie? No. This was at recess, and somebody run to tell teacher on him.”

  “It was you, Billy,” Grandma said.

  “And that sister of mine bust out of Long Point Schoolhouse like she was being shot from a cannon. Her boots never touched gravel as she rounded the building. And in her hand, a padlock and a—”

  “No, Billy. You got two different stories mixed up in your head,” Grandma said, “as usual.”

  Uncle Billy looked hurt.

  “This isn’t the padlock story,” Grandma said. “This is the fishing-pole story. When Charlie threw Estelle’s stocking cap down the privy, I made him take a bamboo pole and a hook and line and go fishing for it down the privy hole. Took him nearly till dark to snag that stocking cap.”

  “Did it faze Charlie?” one of us grandkids asked.

  “Not much,” Grandma said, “even when I made him wear the cap. The padlock story took place the following year when Charlie was repeating eighth grade.”

  “That’s right,” Uncle Billy said, hoping to tell it. “We always locked both them privies every night to discourage vandals and trespassers. The padlocks theirselves rested in teacher’s desk all day long.

  “Well, sir, one day at recess Charlie not only went back to the girls’ privy, but he was smoking in there. You could see the smoke curling out of the half-moon cut in the privy door. And naturally no girl could use it. Somebody run to teacher to tell on—”

  “It was you, Billy,” Grandma said.

  “And that sister of mine bust out of Long Point Schoolhouse like she was being shot from a cannon. Her boots never touched gravel as she rounded the building. And in her hand, a padlock and a claw hammer and a chunk of wood, and in her mouth two tenpenny nails.

  “She drew up short at the girls’ privy and snapped the padlock on the latch. That hemmed in Charlie right there. Then she put that chunk of wood up against the half-moon cut in the door and drove the nails in to keep it in place. She meant to smoke that boy like a turkey.

  “She was quick, so I have an idea Charlie didn’t grasp what had happened and kept on smoking. But it had to dawn on him that there was less and less air to breathe in there, though no privy’s airtight. Anyway, when he tried the door, he seen he was in jail. By then teacher was ringing the bell to call us back from recess. But it was hard to concentrate on our lessons the rest of that morning.”

  “Concentration never came easy for you, Billy,” Grandma said.

  “The sounds coming from the girls’ privy would have waked up the dead,” Uncle Billy remembered. “Charlie was like a bull kicking in a pen. It was cold weather, so he had on boots, and he commenced kicking all four sides. It took him till noon, but he knocked that privy down. Finally it was just Charlie standing out there on bald ground, breathing hard. The privy door was flat before him, and the landscape was littered with pages from the Sears catalogue fluttering like moths.”

  “And there is but little justice in this world,” Grandma added. “The School Board took the cost of that privy out of my wages. They said I’d overstepped my bounds, that I was hired to educate my pupils, not to cure them like hams.”

  “But did it faze Charlie?” one of us grandkids wondered.

  “Not in the least,” Grandma said.

  “There was only one thing left to be done,” Uncle Billy said.

  “And I did it,” Grandma said.

  “What?” we grandkids chorused.

  “I married him,” Grandma said. She peered down the table at Grandpa. “Remember that, Charlie?”

  “I do,” Grandpa said.

  The Supernatural

  You’re never alone in the dark. Or if you are, you can’t be sure.

  —“Shadows”

  These next stories stand in the middle of the book, between the tales of the past and a third group to come set in the present or at least recent times. “Girl at the Window,” “The Most Important Night of Melanie’s Life,” “Waiting for Sebastian,” and “Shadows” are all supernatural, or flavored with the supernatural. They fall in the center because the supernatural so often shifts the shape of time, blending the past with the present. Think of Charl
es Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. After all, ghosts are time travelers, and they have the ability to reset our clocks.

  But do I believe in them? Not really, and may I never see one. But what would the history of literature, of storytelling, be without ghosts? From the Bible to the first scene of Hamlet, to the countless yarns spun in a continuous skein around flickering campfires, they make us edge a little nearer the firelight, and each other.

  None of the ghosts in my stories derive from actual sightings, but all the settings are real places. That’s what all fiction is to me: what might be in settings that are.

  Once, I flew to Emporia, Kansas, sitting next to the pilot in a single-engine plane with a defective door. We flew so low over the country towns that I could read the water towers. Thus, the town in “Girl at the Window.” “The Most Important Night of Melanie’s Life” could be any suburban town far enough north in North America to have a winter.

  “Waiting for Sebastian” acknowledges England’s grand tradition of the ghost story and the haunted house. The old stately home built for a family that now takes paying guests in the story is a house called Rydal Hall near Grasmere in the English Lake District. You could go there and stay in it yourself. “Shadows” is set upstairs in another stately home in a different clime, along the River Road in south Louisiana. The story mentions a house named Nottoway, and so the setting might be near—very near.

  But I’d better say no more about these stories, for fear of giving too much away.

  Early in my career, I wouldn’t have thought of writing chiller tales of the Unexplained. But I kept getting letters, most of them from boys in the seventh and eighth grades. They asked me where my “weird stuff” was, and my ghost stories. “Ever read any Stephen King?” they inquired helpfully. “R. L. Stine?”

  As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. But I was working on a novel at the time taking place back in 1912, about a boy and his great-uncle Miles. It was set in the oldest, grandest, eeriest house in my hometown of Decatur, Illinois. Because of the nudging letters (and because the story wasn’t going too well), I put a ghost in the novel. The minute this dead girl stepped on the stage, the story came alive. I made sure to signal her in the title too: The Ghost Belonged to Me. Then I found I needed another girl in the story, a live one to balance the ghost girl. That very lively living girl became Blossom Culp.