by Richard Peck
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Season of Secrets and Surprises
On the subject of Christmas Mrs. Dowdel made herself clear. It was just another day as far as she was concerned, and she meant to do very little about it this year.
On the other hand, her Monarch stove hadn’t cooled since Thanksgiving. Her kitchen was stacked to the ceiling with black walnut fudge, candied orange peel, Linzertorte, sugar cookies in shapes, pfeffernuss, gingerbread people, springerle, brandy snaps, heavenly hash, popcorn balls, glazed chestnuts, and some fifty pounds of peanut brittle rolled out on a marble top from one of her front room tables. Also, she’d ordered a turkey from the IGA store.
There in front of the IGA the Veterans of Foreign Wars were selling Christmas trees. Mrs. Dowdel was on hand when they opened for business. Several witnesses lingered to observe the rare sight of her shopping for anything. And several reported how she gave each and every tree a good shake to see how dry its needles were. Also, she bad-mouthed several.
A new thing for the Christmas of 1958 was trees sprayed white. One of them was sprayed in a pink that would have shamed Phyllis’s bedroom walls. Witnesses reported that Mrs. Dowdel staggered backward in her gum boots when she came to the pink one.
The only tree of any interest to her was a blue spruce nine foot tall. She grabbed it by the neck, shook the living daylights out of it, and seemed to approve. But when she heard they wanted two and a quarter for it, she erupted like Mount Vesuvius. “I only want the one tree,” she was heard to thunder, “not the whole grove.”
Everybody in town figured she could afford any tree on the lot with what she’d earned off her roadside stand in the time of the Kickapoo Princess. But it hurt Mrs. Dowdel’s feelings to spend money. I’d heard her say many a time that she had short arms and long pockets.
When Mr. Milton Grider asked her why she wouldn’t settle for a tabletop tree in the seventy-five-cent range, she said she wanted a good big one to fill up her bay window, “to light the way for his coming.”
And whether she meant the Christchild or somebody else, no witness knew.
* * *
Ruth Ann thought she knew.
We were seeing a little more of Ruth Ann these days. With the Christmas baking behind them, Mrs. Dowdel was shooing her home, sometimes before dark. Mrs. Dowdel was full of secrets. But then Christmas is the season of secrets, and surprises. It sure was around here.
Ruth Ann was somewhat sulky. “Mrs. Dowdel says we better have our chimney swept. And we don’t even have a fireplace.” Ruth Ann twitched. “And she’s going to have a big tree lit up in her bay window to show him the way. She’s just trying to pull the wool over my eyes.”
Ruth Ann’s grown-up front teeth were about halfway in now. She didn’t whistle and spit so much when she talked. Mother was grooming her for a solo in the choir concert.
“Why do you think Mrs. Dowdel is trying to pull the wool over your eyes?” Dad asked.
Ruth Ann slumped. “She thinks I’m nothing but a little kid. I’m practically halfway through first grade, and she don’t even notice.”
“She doesn’t even notice,” Mother corrected.
“You can say that again,” Ruth Ann said. “She thinks I’m worried he’ll be looking for me in Terre Haute, not here.”
It was just the four of us at the table. Phyllis was upstairs writing a letter to either Elvis or Roscoe.
“Who, honey?” Dad said.
“You know who, Daddy. S-A-N-T-A,” Ruth Ann spelled, “C-L-A-U-S.”
The kitchen clock ticked loud in the silence.
“I haven’t believed since the first month of school.”
She drew up her small shoulders to shrug off Santa Claus. “Word gets around.”
Mother and Dad looked a little sorry. Ruth Ann had been the last Santa believer among us, and now—
“But, honey, are you sure?” Dad said. “What about leaving out cookies for Santa’s treat?”
“Daddy, you ate the cookies.”
“What about . . . reindeer on the roof?”
“Please, Daddy. How would they get up there?”
“Honey, don’t you want to hang up your stocking on Christmas Eve?” It was Dad’s last offer. Ruth Ann pondered.
She pulled on more chins than she had. She really was a miniature Mrs. Dowdel. At least with her teeth coming in, she looked a little less like Mrs. Wilcox. “I hadn’t thought about the stocking,” she said. “But I’m not a baby anymore.” She poked invisible specs back up her nose. “In many important ways I’m practically ten.”
But Grachel was there in her lap. Without the doll buggy, Grachel never got out now. But she rarely missed a meal. Ruth Ann was holding her up so she could look one-eyed across the oilcloth and see everything.
* * *
As it turned out, Mrs. Dowdel got her Christmas tree, and it didn’t cost her a thin dime. It could have cost her her life, and me mine. But it was a free tree.
Christmas was on a Thursday that year, and two Saturdays before it, I was doing some chores for Mrs. Dowdel. She could round you up, cut you out of the herd, and throw a harness on you before you knew it. She wasn’t working Ruth Ann that Saturday because Ruth Ann was at church with Mother, rehearsing for the Christmas Eve choir concert. So was Phyllis. She had to be in the choir too and didn’t like it, mainly because Ruth Ann had the solo.
Anyway, it was in the middle of that Saturday morning, and I thought it was time for a break and maybe a slice of fruitcake. Mrs. Dowdel had baked a gross of them. We’d been working hard. She’d turned all the mattresses, aired the sheets, beat the rugs. I’d had a raft of stuff to bring down from the attic. We were busy as bird dogs. In fact, we were up to something.
Instead of the fruitcake, she said, “Go on out to the cobhouse and find that coil of rope. Bring the biggest saw.”
I should have seen what was coming right there.
When I came out of the cobhouse, she was on her back porch, dressed in her full outdoor gear: flap cap, hunting jacket, two wash dresses and an apron over a pair of men’s pants, cotton stockings over her sleeves, railroader’s gloves. Gum boots. She was everything but armed.
“Where’s your paw?” she inquired, gazing elsewhere.
I told her Dad was working at the food distribution center. All the same people we’d fed at Thanksgiving would be needing Christmas dinners.
“Where’s your car keys?”
I stared up at her. Surely she didn’t know how to drive a car. Except for Mrs. Weidenbach, the only old woman in town who drove was Miss Flora Shellabarger. She had a 1942 Packard Clipper, and she was all over the road with it.
“Above the visor on the driver’s side,” I said.
“Well, we’ll naturally have to take the car,” she said, businesslike. “How else are we going to get to the timber for a tree? Hoo-boy, here comes Effie.”
Sure enough here came Mrs. Wilcox across the yard in her usual rig: Mackinaw jacket, veiled hat, carpet slippers. And today, yarn mittens. “She always knows when I’m goin’ anywhere. I’d have to chloroform her and tie her down to get away without her.”
“I just happened to be passin’,” Mrs. Wilcox sang out. She’d swerved off the road to open country.
The three of us tramped across the yards to where the Pickle was parked. A little pale morning sun had cleared the frost off the windshield, and the first light snow of the season.
None of this seemed quite right.
But when I’d thrown the rope and a big two-handled crosscut saw into the trunk, they were both in the car already. Mrs. Wilcox was in the back. Mrs. Dowdel was on the front seat.
But not behind the wheel.
“I’ll ride shotgun,” she said when I opened the driver’s-side door. I couldn’t see a moment ahead. She was hunkered down and staring straight out through the windshield. “You drive.”
“Mrs. Dowdel, I don’t have a driver’s license. I’m only—”
“A license?” She could hardly believe her
ears. “We’re not goin’ out on Route 36. We’re just goin’ country roads.”
“But—”
“And you’re long enough in the leg,” she observed. “You’ve growed an inch and a half just here this fall.”
“An inch and five-eighths,” I muttered.
“Well then, you’ll reach the pedals, easy.”
“I don’t know how to drive.” But my knee was on the seat. My hand closed over the steering wheel. I thought it’d be another four long years before I could drive. Three and a half to a learner’s permit. Forty-two months. I’d dreamed of the day. But it was a distant dream.
“You’ve watched your paw drive many a time,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “If men can drive a car, how much can there be to it?”
“Hoo-boy,” Mrs. Wilcox said softly from behind.
I was behind the wheel now. One hand gripped it.
The other reached up for the keys. My heart was pounding like pistons. I adjusted the rearview mirror. I knew where the key went. I knew where the starter was. I knew you started in neutral. I hit the starter.
In cold weather the Pickle was usually balky as a mule. It started right up and roared. I watched my hand go for the gearshift. I yanked it into a gear. Maybe first gear. The Pickle howled in pain. I jammed a sneaker down on the clutch and tried again. The Pickle took a giant leap, and died.
“Hold her!” Mrs. Dowdel called out from up against the glove box. “She’s rarin’!”
Mrs. Wilcox disappeared completely from the rearview mirror.
My heart was in my mouth, but my sneaker was on the clutch. I hit the starter, eased into a gear. By chance my sneaker found the gas. We moved. Mrs. Wilcox reappeared in the mirror with her hat on sideways.
The first leap had nearly taken out the grape arbor. But now I tried to steer because we were aimed at the back porch. The steering on a 1950 Nash is loose as a goose, and the hood’s as big as an aircraft carrier. But we lumbered around the arbor and along the side of our house. We were still on private property, but the street was right there at the end of the hood.
“Find the brake,” Mrs. Dowdel mentioned.
There were two of them, the hand brake and the pedal that wasn’t the clutch. I used both. We skidded to a stop. My head hit the steering wheel and honked the horn.
“Go left,” Mrs. Dowdel advised. “We don’t want to drive through town.”
I gave it a little gas, and we leaped out on the snowy slab like a jack rabbit. Did I look both ways? But nothing was coming.
We surged along in giant jerks. Mrs. Wilcox was all over the backseat. Another gear. Where was it? I remembered about the clutch. We whined into second.
I was right there on the crown of the road. If we’d met anything coming at us, I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. “Pick a side,” Mrs. Dowdel said.
I swerved to the ditch and back into the right lane. Mrs. Wilcox seemed to be holding on to a back door handle with both hands. Mrs. Dowdel rode shotgun with her knees wide and her boots planted. Open country unfolded ahead. I discovered third gear, and the whole day brightened.
* * *
I went left when I was told, and I went right when I was told. Every turn took me on a big sweep across both lanes with the fender swooping out over the ditch. But we made it. I was breathing pretty even now, though my heart still hammered. It was like the first day of my life. We edged up to thirty miles an hour. The fences flickered past. Cattle out in the fields stood broadside to the sun. Smoke rose from farmhouse chimneys. I still wasn’t thinking ahead. I couldn’t chance it. But there for a while on the straight stretch I wasn’t even a kid.
I was sixteen.
Since I couldn’t see over the steering wheel, I had to see through it. Now a scary sight loomed ahead. A big bean truck was coming our way, taking more than his share. Mrs. Dowdel’s shoulder came up, but she didn’t say anything.
“Hoo,” said Mrs. Wilcox, and I shot off the road to give the bean truck all the room there was. But it was shoulder, not ditch. We threw gravel and bounced hard, but I got us swerved back and bumped up on the hardtop.
Now there was timber on both sides. We were coming up on a bridge over Salt Crick. I had to line up the wheels with the boards of the bridge, and I made it onto one of them. We clattered across into deeper timber.
“Pull off where you see that track.”
I geared down for the turn. We made it between a pair of fence posts, but it was close. I listened for the sound of peeling chrome.
It wasn’t even a track after a while. It was just brush and snow in the ruts. When we were out of sight of the road, Mrs. Dowdel said, “Wheel around and pull up.” I turned in a clearing, and the engine coughed, lunged, and died. I was wringing wet and about as happy as I’d ever been.
Mrs. Dowdel swung open her door and began to fight her way out. “Get the saw,” she told me. Then she looked in the backseat. “And you stay in the car, Effie. It’s rough underfoot, and if you broke a leg, we’d have to shoot you.”
* * *
Through bare branches we saw a stand of evergreens. I supposed Mrs. Dowdel knew exactly where they were. She tramped through the underbrush and over fallen logs. It was colder and quieter than the rest of outdoors. Winter birds watched us from high branches. Mrs. Dowdel stopped just to drink it all in. She always thought the town was too loud and crowded. But the two moons of her specs were already spotting for trees.
She moved among them, looking over the long-needled pine and the blue spruce, overlooking the scrawny ones.
The saw was heavy in my hand. She took her time, but then she said, “There it is.”
It was a tall blue spruce, taller than we could use, but we could cut it to the right length. She took one end of the saw, and I took the other. In the last moment before we started, she listened to the silence. Then we began to saw.
It was all I could do to keep up my end. She was like a buzz saw herself. In no time at all, the tree began to topple, and she pushed the oozing trunk away.
Between us, we began to drag it back to the Pickle. Just at the edge of the clearing was about a six-foot tree with a perfect cone shape.
“That one do for you folks?”
So we cut that one too. Mrs. Wilcox was all eyes from the backseat. Between us we got both trees roped to the roof of the car. I wasn’t a lot of help with that part, but Mrs. Dowdel could reach halfway across the top.
I thought we were done, but she said, “We’ll need us some greens for wreaths.”
So back we trekked. She’d brought a folding knife. We worked farther into the trees, looking for the right branches, full and feathery. She cut, I carried.
Then she went too far. She’d pushed past one last fir tree, stopped dead, and staggered back. I almost walked up the back of her gum boots.
There ahead of us past freshly laid sod was a brand-new house, ranch style with attached garage and picture window. Even a bird feeder. We were standing in somebody’s backyard.
“Where in the Sam Hill did that place come from?” she wondered. You rarely saw her astonished, but she was. We thought we’d been out in the middle of nowhere. I heard voices, a door, the scrape of feet.
She spun around and nearly knocked me flat. “Run for your life,” she said. “Don’t drop the greens.”
We plunged, skimming the undergrowth, clearing logs. She had the saw. Gunfire behind us would have come as no surprise. Neither would snarling dogs. I ran like a blind boy with my face in the feathery greens. To this day the smell of fir and pine brings back that morning.
Back at the car it was all a blur. Somehow the trunk lid was down, and Mrs. Dowdel and I were in the front seat, fighting for breath.
“Lay rubber,” she said.
“Where’s the fire?” Mrs. Wilcox said.
Then she vanished out of my rearview mirror because I found first gear with no trouble. The Pickle rocketed down the track. I aimed between the fence posts and screeched out on the road on two wheels. Once again if something had been
coming, I wouldn’t be telling this.
We headed back the way we’d come, top-heavy with trees. I was working through the gears like a pro now, and Mrs. Dowdel was wiping up under her specs with a blue bandanna. “Hoo-boy,” she said. “Busy, busy, busy and rushed off my feet. Not enough hours in the day. I’ll die standing up like an old—”
“Ox,” Mrs. Wilcox said from behind. “Did you see anything of the Dempseys?”
“Who in tarnation are the Dempseys?” Mrs. Dowdel asked.
“Why, they’s the folks who bought up that whole tract of land and put up a new house on it.”
My eyes were mostly on the road, but I noticed Mrs. Dowdel’s fists clench on her knees.
“Many thanks for sharin’ that news, Effie,” she said in a dangerous voice.
And we drove on back to town.
I did.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Gift
Since Christmas is also the season of miracles, we were back before we were missed. On the last lap, I got a little overconfident the way you do at twelve. I needed more work on my steering and nearly took out Mrs. Dowdel’s mailbox. But then we were creeping back past our house. I managed to park the Pickle in its regular ruts. It lurched one last time, and the engine died. I put the keys back where they belonged.
Maybe Mother and Dad thought the tree that turned up in our front room was Mrs. Dowdel’s payment for chores I’d been doing for her. Maybe they thought that both that tree and the big one that filled Mrs. Dowdel’s bay window had come from the VFW tree sale up at the IGA. Maybe I let them think it.
Mrs. Dowdel and Ruth Ann decorated for days. They gilded pinecones and strung enough popcorn for two trees. The first graders made paper chains at school, and Ruth Ann made extra. The tree in the bay to show him the way glowed like Times Square with strand after strand of fat-bulbed lights.
There were no presents under Mrs. Dowdel’s tree though. She said she didn’t give any because of inflation.
