A Season of Gifts

by Richard Peck

  One Too Many

  The Shellabarger place was known for miles around. Abraham Lincoln had slept in the milk house on his way to Bement. That was when the milk house was a log dwelling. Old Man Shellabarger had built the present structure in 1878, with gingerbread porches and a tower as tall as a silo.

  The Pickle had gas in it now, but Dad never thought to drive. We ran all the way, kicking through the leaves of the sleeping town. At the Shellabargers’, the porch light lit the yard.

  A car was piled up at the foot of the front steps. It had swerved off the road, jumped the ditch, bounced off the mounting block, and plowed a furrow across the lawn. A car door was off and over in a flowerbed. The frame was way out of whack. The car was scrap iron now and hadn’t been worth much even before it tried to climb the Shellabargers’ front steps. An old DeSoto, with mud flaps and a pair of squirrel tails. One-eyed as I recalled it, with a slipping clutch and a Hollywood muffler. The taillights were still on, but the driver was long gone.

  We hit the porch steps at a gallop. Miss Flora Shellabarger swung open the tall front doors.

  Phyllis was on a settee in the big, shadowy front room. She had an ice pack on her head and both eyes were already black. Her skirt was ripped, and her sock hop socks weren’t so fresh now. She looked pale and washed out, even with lipstick on. The minute she saw Mother and Dad, she felt a lot worse and fell back, clutching her head carefully.

  Mother and Dad moved up on her. They checked her over and felt her head under the ice pack. They lifted her chin and examined her black eyes. She looked like a somewhat dazed muskrat, in barrettes.

  Mother looked long and hard at her. “Sock hop?” Mother said. Phyllis shrank, though only a little.

  Mrs. Dowdel and Miss Cora Shellabarger barged in behind us. They’d fallen back in the dash across town. Mrs. Dowdel could have kept up, but Miss Cora was wearing yarn house slippers, with pompoms.

  Mrs. Dowdel filled up every space, even this vast room. She lifted her nose, and her specs gleamed. “What’s that smell?” she inquired. Miss Flora stiffened. There were a lot of smells. It was the eighty-year-old house of a couple of eighty-year-old women.

  “Smells like a brewery,” Mrs. Dowdel observed. “I wouldn’t say no to a Miller High Life myself, after that sprint across town.”

  “Well, I never!” Miss Flora yanked her bathrobe ties tight. “Mrs. Dowdel, I’ll have you to know Papa was teetotal and Mama was a founding member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I myself turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage from a man because he drank.”

  “Orville Butz,” Mrs. Dowdel recalled.

  “Never you mind who it was,” Miss Flora snapped, cutting short the local history. “Liquor never crossed our threshold. This is a Methodist home.”

  Miss Flora was a lot feistier than Miss Cora, but Mrs. Dowdel waved her away. “I’m talkin’ about that girl right there.” She pointed past us at Phyllis, growing smaller on the settee. “She’s had one too many.”

  * * *

  Silence fell hard. The mantelpiece clock ticked off several slow seconds.

  Then Mother turned on me, of all people. “Bob, go straight home,” she said. “In our haste, we’ve forgotten about Ruth Ann left all alone. Cut right along in case she wakes up.”

  I held my ground. I wanted to know what would happen next. I was all ears.

  “Bob, go now,” Mother said. So I had to, which I didn’t think was fair. Ruth Ann was sawing logs and slept like one. Anyway, they were just trying to get rid of me. Dad pointed out the door.

  But in the long run, it didn’t matter. I heard all about it. Who didn’t? Grade school kids, hermits, the hard-of-hearing. Everybody. As a rule, Miss Cora and Miss Flora would have been the last to know. But this had happened on their doorstep and knocked them out of bed.

  No story moves faster than the one about the bad boy and the preacher’s daughter. You could pick up six or eight versions at the Dairy Queen alone. But where to begin? Might as well start with the car, the one-eyed DeSoto.

  When he had it towed, Police Chief C. P. Snokes noted that it wasn’t registered to anybody. That meant it was the Burdicks’. Anything missing throughout the county from a handsaw to a corncrib ended up at the Burdicks’. Besides, everybody knew the driver was Roscoe Burdick, blue-and-green-eyed Roscoe Burdick, who’d welcomed me to town by half drowning me, then hanging me out to dry in the Dowdel privy. That Roscoe Burdick.

  He was at the wheel and drunk as a skunk when he lost control of the DeSoto on homecoming night and plowed that furrow up to the Shellabarger porch steps. Phyllis flew out, lighting headfirst on that first concrete step.

  But how she happened to be there and not at the sock hop made for a longer story.

  First of all, Roscoe Burdick had sideburns down to here and shirts unbuttoned down to there. He seemed to know all the verses of the song “Ready Teddy,” and he owned a pair of blue suede shoes. He was about as Elvis as Phyllis would ever get.

  Waynetta Blalock had always thought she had Roscoe pretty well sewed up. She’d told the whole high school that she could make something out of him, Burdick or not. Waynetta’s mother naturally wouldn’t let a Burdick on the porch. But that only made Roscoe more interesting to Waynetta. Her plan was to graduate and then start to look seriously at silver patterns.

  But from that night before school started when Roscoe saw Phyllis strolling past the Dairy Queen, it was a whole new ballgame.

  Of course he was pushing twenty, but that’s the age Phyllis thought she was, in her head. She’d been sneaking out with him all fall.

  They’d been spotted at a tractor pull as far away as Rantoul. In fact on homecoming sock hop night he’d taken her over to the Decatur Drive-in to see an Elvis double feature, Loving You and King Creole. We’d been peppered with clues all fall, but Mother and Dad didn’t pick up on them since Phyllis was only fourteen.

  Waynetta had, of course. She’d been sitting home with nobody to sneak out with and getting ready to blow her top. So in time I guess she would have blacked both Phyllis’s eyes if the porch steps hadn’t done it for her.

  On Sunday Mother meant to drag Phyllis out of bed and make her go to church to show her shameful face to the world. But Phyllis threw up right at her. Oh boy, was she sick, all day. “I thought it was root beer,” she groaned, but got no sympathy.

  “If I believed this would teach you a lesson, young lady,” Mother said, “I’d be happier than I am.”

  I was sent up with Sunday dinner on a tray: liver and onions, pickled beets, and vinegar slaw. Their smell and the stomach-pink walls of Phyllis’s room were a bad combination. She was sick all over again.

  I edged the tray onto her bed, just trying to be helpful.

  “I’ll never eat again,” she said from deep in her damp pillow. “Take it away.”

  “Where’ll I put it?”

  “Don’t make me tell you.”

  “Mother and Dad say we may have to leave town, thanks to you,” I pointed out to her. “They say we haven’t set a good example for the community and all eyes are upon us. Also, liquor was involved.”

  “I thought it was root beer,” Phyllis moaned.

  “You said that,” I answered.

  “If those two old biddies, those Shellabarger sisters, would just keep their traps shut, we could forget all about it,” Phyllis said. “But they won’t.”

  “Also, liquor was involved,” I reminded.

  “And that old battle-ax Mrs. Dowdel is everywhere I turn,” Phyllis griped. “She’s all over me like . . . like . . .”

  “White on rice,” I said.

  “Like what?” Phyllis groaned.

  “White on rice. It’s one of her sayings.”

  “I hate this podunk town,” Phyllis said. “I can’t tell you how much. And Mother and Dad are prejudiced against Roscoe. Everybody is. Nobody understands him.”

  “Everybody understands he cut and ran when he piled up the car and left you knocked cuckoo on
the Shellabarger steps,” I remarked.

  “He’s sensitive.” Phyllis gagged, reaching for the basin. “All he needs is the love of a good woman.” Then she was real sick again.

  * * *

  On Monday morning Phyllis, wearing sunglasses, clung to her mattress and said she wouldn’t be going to school, ever. She was resigning from freshman year because Waynetta Blalock was prejudiced against her and so was the whole school.

  From the foot of her bed Mother was telling her about how she’d be going to school and nowhere else. Phyllis just might be grounded for life. You never saw Mother lose her temper. It was against her beliefs. But she was blowing sky-high this morning. She had a good grip on Phyllis’s bed railing.

  “Young lady,” she said, “I don’t know what sort of phase you’re going through. And I certainly can’t remember going through anything like it myself, thank goodness. But I’ll tell you here and now you’ve gone too far, and I’m going to nip you in the bud.”

  Even I shied at that, out here in the hall. Phyllis didn’t.

  “Are you threatening me?” she snapped from the bed. The covers were pulled up to her chin. She was all sunglasses and sassy mouth.

  “I am giving you fair warning,” Mother said in a low and steady voice. “I will take steps.”

  Ruth Ann and Grachel sat on their bed over across the pink stripe. Their three eyes took everything in.

  I’d only lingered a little at the door, on my way to school. But Mother saw me with the eyes in the back of her head. She turned on me, of all people.

  “Bob!”

  I froze.

  “Just how much of this whole . . . situation did you know about, young man?”

  Silence fell. Mother waited, her back still turned to me. Three eyes turned on me from Ruth Ann’s bed. “I’m waiting,” Mother said.

  “Not too much,” I mumbled. “Just what everybody knows at school. Even the country kids. Just stuff. Like how Roscoe and Phyllis were spotted at the tractor pull over in Rantoul. And she goes on a lot of hay rides, not just the Future Farmers one. And of course everybody knows Waynetta Blalock is real sore at Phyllis for steal—”

  “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. I’M GOING.” Phyllis flung off her covers and staggered blindly out of bed in her sunglasses. And off she sulked to school in a darned skirt and still looking a lot like a muskrat. Or a raccoon. Whichever one has big black eyes.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Blazing Pumpkin

  With homecoming behind us, Halloween began to happen, two weeks early. Soaped windows and pinned car horns and lawn furniture up in trees and dead cats on porches. Unknown hands put a brooder house, complete with a flock of hens inside, on the railroad tracks. The Norfolk & Western evening St. Louis train hit it broadside. There was kindling and chicken parts on every roof in town. Trees dripped giblets, and there was hen grit everywhere.

  Halloween began early, but then so did Mrs. Dowdel. When it came to the future, she was always a step ahead.

  There were two schools of thought about her. One was that greasing her porch steps or tearing down her privy wasn’t a real good idea. On the other hand, nobody had yet dug up her treasure of cash money, wherever it was buried. As usual, she seemed to pay no heed to public opinion.

  She and Ruth Ann even carved a giant pumpkin. They’d scooped it out, baked some pies and a few loaves of pumpkin bread. Now it stood blazing with candles every night on the Dowdel front steps, daring anybody to knock it off.

  On Halloween night Dad took Ruth Ann out to ring a few doorbells and collect some treats. He had calls to pay on shut-ins anyway. For a costume Ruth Ann wanted to go as an Indian princess, but Dad talked her out of it. In the end, she came downstairs with her trick-or-treat sack, wearing a plaid flannel shirt of mine, her own bedroom slippers, and one of Mother’s hats, with a veil.

  “Honey, who are you?” Dad said.

  “Mrs. Wilcox,” she said, crossing her eyes.

  They left, and I went on up to the party at the Grange Hall the 4-H gave to keep us off the streets. It was an okay party, with donuts. At least we didn’t have to pin the tail on the donkey or bob for apples. Some of the country kids came in for it. I guess you can’t do much Halloweening down on the farm.

  Jess Wood showed up, and there was some corn silk smoked outside behind the trucks. But a few of the eighth graders started a game that could have ended up with kissing, so a bunch of us went home. Jess did, and he could drive his dad’s truck himself.

  Later that night there was a thumbnail of moon, a touch of winter in the hazy air. Phyllis and Ruth Ann were both in bed. Phyllis hadn’t gone anywhere, being grounded. Ruth Ann had laid out all the treats she’d collected to show Grachel. Now she was sawing logs. I was at my window, still dressed from the party, waiting for whatever would happen next. Something was going to. You could feel it in the air.

  The giant pumpkin glowed on Mrs. Dowdel’s front steps. Above the cobhouse roof hung the glow of a campfire dying down. Anyone trespassing on her melon patch would see a figure humped in afghans, a shotgun across her knees, sitting guard as promised.

  Car horns still went off, but far away. Sudden gunfire from right next door would have come as no surprise, of course. It was like Fort Leonard Wood over there. But all was silence until the sudden snap of a kitchen door.

  A cloud blurred the narrow moon. A large figure crossed the side yard, darker than night except for the white hair.

  I was downstairs when Dad opened the door. Mrs. Dowdel was on the porch. But how could she be since she was sitting guard out in her melon patch?

  But here she was, dressed in a complete outfit saved from her dead husband: canvas coat over overalls, gum boots, flap cap—hunting gear.

  “Bagged him,” she said to Dad. “Call the law.”

  We had a phone now. We had to. People kept calling up Dad to plan their future funerals. When he turned back to make the call, I slipped out. After all, an old lady shouldn’t be out at all hours, alone in the dark.

  The corners of her dim kitchen were crowded with eerie shapes like severed heads: pumpkins too ugly to sell she was saving for Thanksgiving pies. “Don’t worry,” she said over her shoulder. “I got him tied to the leg of the bed.”

  I kept on her heels up the linoleum steps. Her heavy tread rocked the house. Light fell from one of the bedrooms—her grandson’s: Joey’s.

  She filled the doorway, and somebody in there yelped at another sight of her.

  “Turn me loose,” a deep, whiny voice said. “I was just trick-or-treatin’ is all I was doin’.”

  “With a crowbar and an ax in my upstairs bedroom?” she thundered. “You’re lookin’ at doin’ time, boy, in the state reformatory.” The gun hung broken over her canvas sleeve.

  My heart thudded. Had she nailed him? Had he walked right into her trap through her unlocked front door past her blazing pumpkin? Had she finally got the goods on Roscoe Burdick?

  I peered around her. There, kicking the bedroom floor on a rag rug between a crowbar and an ax—there with his wrists trussed up behind him and one ankle tied by fishing line to the leg of the bed, was Newt Fluke.

  My heart sank.

  Mrs. Dowdel had been gunning for Roscoe Burdick. But she’d bagged a Fluke. “Who sent you on this particular errand?”

  “Nobody,” he muttered. “I thought it up my own self.”

  “You ain’t had a thought of your own yet,” she remarked.

  “And you know what you are?” Newt Fluke dared say from the floor, though his teeth chattered. There was no heat up here. “You’re a durned witch. How can you be out in your melon patch and up here, settin’ on this bed waitin’ for me? How can you be in two places at once? You’re a—”

  “Boy,” she said, “I can be in three places if need be.”

  Right about then we heard the siren on C. P. Snokes’s Dodge. I’d kept behind Mrs. Dowdel, trying to be invisible in case Newt ever got out on bail.

  * * *

  I was home then, bef
ore I was missed. From my window I watched C. P. Snokes cramming Newt Fluke into the backseat of the squad car.

  Mrs. Dowdel stood in the headlight glare with her fists on her big hips. She looked about half satisfied. Then when the car door closed on Newt, she said to the police chief, “They’s another one in my snowballs.” She crooked a thumb at her house. Sure enough, another gangly figure exploded out of the snowball bushes by her bay window. He swerved for the road, lighting out for tall timber. They let him go. Around here, you can run, but you can’t hide. It was Elmo Leaper, Jr. He’d been left to stand guard while Newt went in to dig up the bedroom floor.

  Halloween was finally petering out as the Dodge reversed into the road. I could hear Dad up in his attic study, trying to get back to his sermon. It might be Saturday already.

  Then came a stealthy footfall on the stairs. I cracked my door. Was Phyllis making a break for freedom? But it was Mother.

  Mother, coming up, taking steps. I blinked to be sure. She looked kind of frost-bitten, though she was wearing several afghans. Weirder still, she carried a shotgun broken open over her arm. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Mother? Packing heat? Silent as snow she made for her room, and the door closed behind her.

  Mother and Mrs. Dowdel . . . working hand in glove? I fell back on the bed, dizzy with what grown-ups can get up to. I drifted off into my usual dream. The one about going down for the third time in Salt Crick, sucking brown water and dragonflies, with Roscoe Burdick’s heavy hand on my head. But then I slept deeper than the crick, into November.

  E’er the Winter Storms Begin

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Come, Ye Thankful People, Come

  Thanksgiving now, and Christmas coming. The last leaves burned in long piles in the ditches. White smoke rose through bare limbs like ancient Kickapoo campfires.

  The second frost had killed the cannas, so there was nothing between us and Mrs. Dowdel.

  She was too busy to sit down. “Busier than a one-armed paperhanger,” she claimed. “I’ll die standing up, like an old ox,” she said, another of her sayings.