A Season of Gifts

by Richard Peck

  Ruth Ann was half asleep in Dad’s arms as we turned toward home. The big tree still blazing in Mrs. Dowdel’s bay window showed us the way, though she’d put it there to show Brad his. Our own tree winked out of the front window across the porch.

  As soon as we were inside, we saw we’d had a visitor. There on an end table was a plate of Christmas cookies, half eaten—sugar cookies in shapes and divinity fudge.

  Ruth Ann was bolt awake now and sliding down Dad. She rolled her eyes at the cookies and stared at the tree. Actually, the Dempseys’ tree.

  In front of it stood a doll buggy, and it hadn’t come from the Goodwill store. This was an old-timer, tall and wicker with wire wheels and a patent-leather seat. It looked a lot like one Mrs. Dowdel had me bring down from her attic. You could find anything up in that attic.

  Now it was freshly sprayed a snowy white with ribbons worked through the wicker. Somehow Grachel had found her way downstairs and into it. She sat in the patent-leather seat, gazing one-eyed around the room, wondering what had kept us.

  “Would you look at that,” Dad said. “Seems like we’ve had a visit from Saint Nick while we—”

  “Daddy,” Ruth Ann said, small but sure, “there is no Santa. Word gets around.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off that grand, antique doll buggy. She was ready to take Grachel for a midnight airing this minute. She looked up at Phyllis and me like we ought to get ready to go.

  “If it wasn’t Santa,” Dad said, “who was it?”

  We waited. Mother’s hand slipped into Dad’s.

  “Hoo-boy,” Ruth Ann said. “It was Mrs. Dowdel.”

  “Was it?” Dad said. “Then I wonder what you could give her in return. Something she’d like. Seems like she’s always the one giving the gifts.”

  Ruth Ann thought. She pulled on more chins than she had. She patted her back hair, braided with white bows to match her choir robe.

  “I know what.” She raised a small finger. “I could tell her I thought Santa brought it.”

  “Good girl,” Dad said.

  Then we all hung up our stockings with care because we did that every year. I hadn’t expected much out of this particular Christmas since I was in kind of an in-between time: too old for toys and still forty-two months from a learner’s permit. But it was the Christmas we always remembered.

  By the time I got up to my room, Mrs. Dowdel had doused her Christmas tree lights. She’d lit our way home, and she had her great-grandson with her. I expect he was all the Christmas she needed. Her whole house seemed to be asleep, the last house in town. And the melon patch behind. The town slept now, nestled among the silvered fields.

  Under a Christmas star.

  Epilogue

  It was to be our only Christmas in that town, the Christmas of 1958 all those Christmases ago. In another year we were in Quincy, and Dad had the pulpit of Grace Methodist there. By the time I graduated from high school, we were in Rockford. Phyllis was at Illinois Wesleyan University. And Ruth Ann was in junior high, with her own room and a Beatles poster on every wall. You think growing up takes forever, but it doesn’t.

  Each of Dad’s churches was bigger, in a bigger town. From that time when Gypsy Piggott had to fold his revival tent after the first night, Dad’s star began to rise. He was especially praised for his funerals and weddings. Word gets around.

  We did some growing up wherever we were, but we grew up the most in that little podunk town when we lived next door to Mrs. Dowdel.

  She was no church woman, and she didn’t neighbor, and Christmas was just another day to her. But she didn’t wait for Christmas to give out her gifts. She gave too many. They wouldn’t have fit under the tree, not even the tallest blue spruce from the Dempseys’ backyard.

  Discussion Guide for

  A Season of Gifts

  • What is the relationship between the Barnhart kids from A Season of Gifts—Bob, Ruth Ann, and Phyllis—and Mrs. Dowdel? How are their experiences similar to those of Grandma Dowdel and her grandchildren in both A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder? How are they different?

  • Moving to a new town is always difficult, but especially when, as Mrs. Barnhart says, “All eyes are upon us.” What does that mean? How does that influence the way the Barnharts act in town? What is the town’s reaction to them both before school starts and in school?

  • What does Bob think of Mrs. Dowdel when he first moves in next door? How does his opinion of her change?

  • Who are the Cowgills, the Flukes, the Leapers, and the Burdicks? How do their interactions with the Barnharts, Mrs. Dowdel, and the rest of the town shape the story? What is Mrs. Dowdel’s relationship to them and how does she ultimately give them all that they deserve?

  • Why does Ruth Ann idolize Mrs. Dowdel? What does Ruth Ann learn from Mrs. Dowdel and what does Mrs. Dowdel gain from having Ruth Ann around?

  • After moving, Phyllis seems to be getting into more and more trouble. When did you first notice that she might be doing things she shouldn’t? When do the other characters notice what she’s doing? How does Mrs. Dowdel help to stop Phyllis from spinning totally out of control?

  • Mrs. Dowdel acts aloof and uninterested, but she does a lot to help the Barnharts when they are settling in next door. What are some of the things she does for the family? How does she carry off all her schemes? And how do the Barnharts repay her many gifts to them?

  • Which characters apart from Mrs. Dowdel can you recognize from A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago? How do those characters interact with Mrs. Dowdel? What similarities do you see in the way people in the same family act even after so much time has gone by?

  • How have the Barnharts changed by the end of the story as a result of their interactions with Mrs. Dowdel? What situations have changed as a result of Mrs. Dowdel’s involvement and what were the outcomes? How is A Season of Gifts an appropriate title for this story?

  A NOTE FROM AUTHOR

  RICHARD PECK

  It was a happy day for me and my career when Grandma Dowdel strode into my life. She came courtesy of a colleague, Harry Mazer. He was putting together an anthology of gun stories (Twelve Shots, Delacorte Press, 1997). However unlikely and politically questionable a volume of gun stories for young readers might seem, I wanted to contribute. I looked up and there at my study door stood Grandma Dowdel, larger than life with a Winchester in her hand—locked and loaded.

  Her story became “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground,” and when the editor of my books read it, she suggested it as the first chapter of a whole novel starring Grandma Dowdel. That book became A Long Way from Chicago as Grandma expanded to fill it cover to cover.

  In Robert Frost’s useful phrase, way leads on to way. In 1999, A Long Way from Chicago won a Newbery Honor from the American Library Association. And when that happens, your editor calls for a sequel. Happily, Grandma Dowdel had two grandchildren: Joey to narrate the first book and Mary Alice for the sequel, A Year Down Yonder. It won the 2001 Newbery Medal.

  Letters keep coming from readers of all ages, inquiring about Grandma Dowdel. “Was she your grandmother?” the letters ask.

  Did my grandmother, Mrs. Owen Peck of Cerro Gordo, Illinois, steal the sheriff’s boat to trap fish illegally? Did she drive a tractor into a pecan tree, at full speed? Did she spike the punch at a Daughters of the American Revolution tea? Well, no. When you’re a writer, you can give yourself the grandmother you wish you’d had.

  But the town she lives in is the town where my grandmother lived, and the house with the lightning rods on the roof and the snowball bushes crowding the bay window is my grandmother’s. And my own grandmother was six feet tall even without the crown of snow-white hair. And she wore aprons the size of Alaska.

  But Grandma Dowdel is her own person, created to communicate with young readers today: an encouragement to be that independent and resourceful and—secretly—that loving. But Grandma Dowdel didn’t drop down from my family tree. Fiction isn’t what was. I
t’s what if? And a novelist is one who believes that real life can always be improved upon.

  Richard Peck

  For more about Richard Peck, visit www.scbwi.org/store.htm for information on the SCBWI Master Class DVD “Richard Peck: On Writing the Novel for Young Readers.” This extensive video interview takes you inside the craft and creative process of a writer whose beloved and award-winning novels have inspired generations of readers and writers alike.

  TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE FIRST CHAPTER OF . . .

  A Long Way from Chicago

  HC: 978-0-8037-2290-3

  PB: 978-0-14-130352-9

  PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS PB EDITION: 978-0-14-240110-1

  A Newbery Honor Book

  A National Book Award Finalist

  An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  An ALA Notable Children’s Book

  A Horn Book Fanfare selection

  “A small masterpiece of storytelling.”

  —The Horn Book, starred review

  “Remarkable and fine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Part vaudeville act, part laconic tall tale, the stories, with their dirty tricks and cunning plots, make you laugh out loud. . . .”

  —Booklist, starred review

  Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground

  1929

  You wouldn’t think we’d have to leave Chicago to see a dead body. We were growing up there back in the bad old days of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Just the winter before, they’d had the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre over on North Clark Street. The city had such an evil reputation that the Thompson submachine gun was better known as a “Chicago typewriter.”

  But I’d grown to the age of nine, and my sister Mary Alice was seven, and we’d yet to see a stiff. We guessed that most of them were where you couldn’t see them, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, wearing concrete overshoes.

  No, we had to travel all the way down to our Grandma Dowdel’s before we ever set eyes on a corpse. Dad said Mary Alice and I were getting to the age when we could travel on our own. He said it was time we spent a week with Grandma, who was getting on in years. We hadn’t seen anything of her since we were tykes. Being Chicago people, Mother and Dad didn’t have a car. And Grandma wasn’t on the telephone.

  “They’re dumping us on her is what they’re doing,” Mary Alice said darkly. She suspected that Mother and Dad would take off for a week of fishing up in Wisconsin in our absence.

  I didn’t mind going because we went on the train, the Wabash Railroad’s crack Blue Bird that left Dearborn Station every morning, bound for St. Louis. Grandma lived somewhere in between, in one of those towns the railroad tracks cut in two. People stood out on their porches to see the train go through.

  Mary Alice said she couldn’t stand the place. For one thing, at Grandma’s you had to go outside to the privy. It stood just across from the cobhouse, a tumbledown shed full of stuff left there in Grandpa Dowdel’s time. A big old snaggletoothed tomcat lived in the cobhouse, and as quick as you’d come out of the privy, he’d jump at you. Mary Alice hated that.

  Mary Alice said there was nothing to do and nobody to do it with, so she’d tag after me, though I was two years older and a boy. We’d stroll uptown in those first days. It was only a short block of brick buildings: the bank, the insurance agency, Moore’s Store, and The Coffee Pot Cafe, where the old saloon had stood. Prohibition was on in those days, which meant that selling liquor was against the law. So people made their own beer at home. They still had the tin roofs out over the sidewalk, and hitching rails. Most farmers came to town horse-drawn, though there were Fords, and the banker, L. J. Weidenbach, drove a Hupmobile.

  It looked like a slow place to us. But that was before they buried Shotgun Cheatham. He might have made it unnoticed all the way to the grave except for his name. The county seat newspaper didn’t want to run an obituary on anybody called Shotgun, but nobody knew any other name for him. This sparked attention from some of the bigger newspapers. One sent in a stringer to nose around The Coffee Pot Cafe for a human-interest story since it was August, a slow month for news.

  The Coffee Pot was where people went to loaf, talk tall, and swap gossip. Mary Alice and I were of some interest when we dropped by because we were kin of Mrs. Dowdel’s, who never set foot in the place. She said she liked to keep herself to herself, which was uphill work in a town like that.

  Mary Alice and I carried the tale home that a suspicious type had come off the train in citified clothes and a stiff straw hat. He stuck out a mile and was asking around about Shotgun Cheatham. And he was taking notes.

  Grandma had already heard it on the grapevine that Shotgun was no more, though she wasn’t the first person people ran to with news. She wasn’t what you’d call a popular woman. Grandpa Dowdel had been well thought of, but he was long gone.

  That was the day she was working tomatoes on the black iron range, and her kitchen was hot enough to steam the calendars off the wall. Her sleeves were turned back on her big arms. When she heard the town was apt to fill up with newspaper reporters, her jaw clenched.

  Presently she said, “I’ll tell you what that reporter’s after. He wants to get the horselaugh on us because he thinks we’re nothing but a bunch of hayseeds and no-count country people. We are, but what business is it of his?”

  “Who was Shotgun Cheatham anyway?” Mary Alice asked.

  “He was just an old reprobate who lived poor and died broke,” Grandma said. “Nobody went near him because he smelled like a polecat. He lived in a chicken coop, and now they’ll have to burn it down.”

  To change the subject she said to me, “Here, you stir these tomatoes, and don’t let them stick. I’ve stood in this heat till I’m half-cooked myself.”

  I didn’t like kitchen work. Yesterday she’d done apple butter, and that hadn’t been too bad. She made that outdoors over an open fire, and she’d put pennies in the caldron to keep it from sticking.

  “Down at The Coffee Pot they say Shotgun rode with the James boys.”

  “Which James boys?” Grandma asked.

  “Jesse James,” I said, “and Frank.”

  “They wouldn’t have had him,” she said. “Anyhow, them Jameses was Missouri people.”

  “They were telling the reporter Shotgun killed a man and went to the penitentiary.”

  “Several around here done that,” Grandma said, “though I don’t recall him being out of town any length of time. Who’s doing all this talking?”

  “A real old, humped-over lady with buck teeth,” Mary Alice said.

  “Cross-eyed?” Grandma said. “That’d be Effie Wilcox. You think she’s ugly now, you should have seen her as a girl. And she’d talk you to death. Her tongue’s attached in the middle and flaps at both ends.” Grandma was over by the screen door for a breath of air.

  “They said he’d notched his gun in six places,” I said, pushing my luck. “They said the notches were either for banks he’d robbed or for sheriffs he’d shot.”

  “Was that Effie again? Never trust an ugly woman. She’s got a grudge against the world,” said Grandma, who was no oil painting herself. She fetched up a sigh. “I’ll tell you how Shotgun got his name. He wasn’t but about ten years old, and he wanted to go out and shoot quail with a bunch of older boys. He couldn’t hit a barn wall from the inside, and he had a sty in one eye. They were out there in a pasture without a quail in sight, but Shotgun got all excited being with the big boys. He squeezed off a round and killed a cow. Down she went. If he’d been aiming at her, she’d have died of old age eventually. The boys took the gun off him, not knowing who he’d plug next. That’s how he got the name, and it stuck to him like flypaper. Any girl in town could have outshot him, and that includes me.” Grandma jerked a thumb at herself.

  She kept a twelve-gauge double-barreled Winchester Model 21 behind the woodbox, but we figured it had been Grandpa Dowdel’s for shooting ducks. “And I wasn’t no Annie Oakley myself, except with
squirrels.” Grandma was still at the door, fanning her apron. Then in the same voice she said, “Looks like we got company. Take them tomatoes off the fire.”

  A stranger was on the porch, and when Mary Alice and I crowded up behind Grandma to see, it was the reporter. He was sharp-faced, and he’d sweated through his hatband.

  “What’s your business?” Grandma said through screen wire, which was as friendly as she got.

  “Ma’am, I’m making inquiries about the late Shotgun Cheatham.” He shuffled his feet, wanting to get one of them in the door. Then he mopped up under his hat brim with a silk handkerchief. His Masonic ring had diamond chips in it.

  “Who sent you to me?”

  “I’m going door-to-door, ma’am. You know how you ladies love 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 might grab up her broom to swat him off the porch. We’d already seen how she could make short work of peddlers even when they weren’t lippy. And tramps didn’t seem to mark her fence post. We suspected that you didn’t get inside her house even if she knew you. But to our surprise she swept open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. I followed. 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?”