A Season of Gifts (4 page)

Sunlight still flooded her kitchen. The wall clock read a quarter to five. I hadn’t been in the privy as long as it seemed. A big black Monarch iron range hulked along one wall. She’d never taken down a calendar. One of them read:

EVERY GOOD WISH FOR
BRIGHTER DAYS IN 1933

Mrs. Dowdel was bigger with walls around her and a ceiling. Her apron was full of bulging pockets.

She was a walking Woolworth’s: a narrow-nosed handsaw, a claw hammer, clothespins, and now a ball of fishing line.

“Trail me upstairs,” she mentioned. “Don’t trip on your tarp.”

She pulled herself up a long, shadowy flight of linoleum
stairs. I followed. She wore giant felt shoes with one button straining over the foot.

At the top of the stairs she elbowed a door open. In there dusty west light filtered through darned curtains. The windowsill was a wasp graveyard. An ancient brass bed angled out of a corner. The mattress looked like it was stuffed with cornhusks. A darker triangle showed on the wallpaper where a pennant had hung.

Mrs. Dowdel turned to a big chest and found what she was looking for: a shirt for a bigger boy than I was. It was kind of old-timey, but I hadn’t come here to argue. It was faded out, but then so were my own four shirts. Three now. Out of the drawer she drew a pair of old dungarees.

“These is about the smallest I’ve got.” She turned away to the window.

I dropped my tarp. “As to underwear,” she said over her shoulder, “the only pair that comes to mind was Dowdel’s, my late husband. And they’d be a hundred percent wool with buttons before and a trapdoor behind.”

“No, thank you,” I said, “ma’am.”

The shirt had been striped at one time, but it smelled starchy and clean. I could turn up the dungaree legs, but the waist was on the wide side.

Mrs. Dowdel turned my way. The gold light pouring around her shadowed her face. But I saw right there she was somebody else. Her old hand stole up to her mouth.

She turned aside, and there was glitter behind her glasses. “Last boy wore them togs,” she said, “was my grandson, Joey. That’s been pretty nearly twenty-five years back. He’s all growed. Don’t ask me why I kept his stuff, except I keep everything. You never know.”

She blinked and saw I was holding up the pants. “Lemme see what we’ve got for a belt.” She inventoried her apron and came up with the ball of fishing line. Unwinding a shorter length, she handed it over, and I tied it around me.

“You better skin home,” she said. “They may not have missed you yet. You can grow into them clothes. Do you for school.”

I turned to go, ready to thank her.

“Hold it,” she said, and I froze. “Who done it?”

I teetered on the doorsill in this other boy’s clothes. “If I tell, I expect they’ll kill me.”

Mrs. Dowdel shrugged. “They may kill you anyhow.”

So I admitted it was the bunch that headed out to the crick every afternoon. “Their leader’s older than a kid.”

“One blue eye and one green eye?” Mrs. Dowdel inquired. That was it. That’s what was funny and scary about his eyes.

“That’d be Roscoe Burdick. He’s Mildred’s boy, and bound to be right at twenty years old. I don’t know what he’s still doing around these parts. At his age, most Burdicks is on the chain gang.”

She gazed away, recalling everybody’s family history. No secrets around here.

“As for the rest of the bunch,” she said, “they’re all Cowgills—Ernie’s boys—and Flukes—Augie’s boys—and Leapers—Elmo’s boys. All dumber than stumps. Them families never was worth a toot. Not all varmints is four-legged. That bunch is the same ones who shot out all the windows in your church building.”

“Do they go to school?” Suddenly I was looking ahead, into the terrible future.

“Now and again, some of them,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Not Roscoe naturally. They’s teachers younger than him. He spent so many years in first grade, they named the desk for him.”

Now I was looking ahead to going home, and my eyes were stinging. Last year, back in Terre Haute, when I was still a kid, I’d have gone home bawling. Now I didn’t want to. And I never wanted anybody to know how Mrs. Dowdel found me in her privy. Ever.

She seemed to read my mind, or something. “I expect you can get by in that outfit till you’re up in your room and into your own togs. I wouldn’t worry your folks if I was you. The way I hear it, they have troubles of their own. Anyhow, they’d just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn’t they?”

That’s exactly what they’d tell me. It had to do with loving your enemies.

“Trouble is,” Mrs. Dowdel observed, “after you’ve turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.”

I couldn’t figure out how to thank her. She was pointing
me out of her grandson’s room. Joey’s. “I’ve got me a spare jar of apple butter,” she said. “And I baked today. You can take a loaf to your maw. Tell her you found it on the porch.”

She was wheezing down the stairs behind me. The house shook. If she fell on me I was a goner. “And don’t look for anything out of the law around here,” she said. “The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It’s every man for hisself.”

I felt the town tighten around my throat.

“But as the saying goes, if you can’t get justice,” Mrs. Dowdel remarked, “get even.”

*  *  *

She kept right after me all the way down to the one-hinged kitchen door. Outside, the garden and the cannas were still as an oil painting. The sinking sun was fire-red in all our side windows. Tools clanked in Mrs. Dowdel’s apron pockets.

In my puniest voice I said, “You won’t say anything about how you found—”

“Never set eyes on you in my life,” she said, locking the screen door behind me.

N
ot a leaf stirred that last week of August as the world waited for school to start. The night before it did, Phyllis barged in my room without knocking.

“Stop moping in your room,” she said, though she’d been moping in hers. “Let’s get out of here and go for a walk or something.”

Phyllis inviting me to do something? “Where?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We can walk down to the school, see how long it takes.”

How long could it take? You could see open country at either end of the main street.

“It’s easy being you,” she said. “You’re just going into another grade of grade school. Nothing to it. I’m having to start high school—here. High school. Do you have the faintest idea of what that means?”

Not too much. But it sounded better than grade school to me. I thought life started when you got to high school. Grade school was just one day after another.

“If we’re going for a walk, we’ll have to take Ruth Ann,” I said.

Phyllis slumped. This was another reminder that I had my own room while she had to share with Ruth Ann.

“I hope I come back as a boy,” Phyllis said.

“From the walk?” I said.

“No, in my next life, you nincompoop.”

I followed her across the hall and jumped back at her door. To help her settle in, Mother had let Phyllis paint her room in her choice of color. She’d picked a Day-Glo pink that really yelled at you. It was like being inside a stomach.

Then Phyllis had painted a stripe of that same Day-Glo pink down the center of the floor and warned Ruth Ann never to set a sandal across it.

Phyllis had hung her Elvis Presley posters, all eight of them, around both sides of the room. I know for a fact Phyllis wrote letters to Elvis Presley regularly, though she never heard back. Ruth Ann sat bunched up on her bed, clutching her dolly. Looming above her was a giant poster of Elvis in a cowboy rig and neckerchief, strumming a guitar. Another was Elvis in the gold coat he wore on his tour last year. Elvis was all swooping hair and sideburns and showing teeth in
life-size sneers, all over the room. He was everywhere. It was like being in a revolving door with him.

“I’m scared,” Ruth Ann said over her knees. She made big eyes up at a poster. “Don’t go out and leave me with him.” She whispered for fear Elvis would hear.

“We’re taking you,” Phyllis said. “But don’t wander off from us or else. You know how you are.”

Ruth Ann scooted off her bed, dragging her dolly. She’d loved it almost completely bald. Its eyes used to close. Now one was permanently closed. My eyes were still pinwheeling from the pink walls, but I saw Phyllis had laid out her first-day school outfit for tomorrow. Pencil-slim skirt and new blouse with circle pin, fresh-looking bobby socks and nearly new saddle shoes from the Goodwill store in Terre Haute. We made a lot of sacrifices for Phyllis.

To copy her, Ruth Ann had laid out her dress too, the shiny plaid one that did her for church. Matching ribbons for her braids. She had about a month’s wear left in her sandals.

Girls take their time, but we were finally ready. Phyllis wore her sundress with the jacket in case we met anybody on the street. She’d scrubbed her sneakers. I have to admit she was a real pretty girl, though whether that would do her any good at this school, who knew?

“Stay on the lighted street,” Mother called after us.

Out on the porch Ruth Ann plunked her dolly into
the doll buggy. She never traveled light. We were lucky she didn’t bring her hula hoop. She bumped the buggy down the steps.

“Why are you taking that thing?” Phyllis wanted to know.

“She hasn’t been out all day,” Ruth Ann said. “She needs some air. She’s practically gasping.” She meant her doll, named Grachel. Don’t even ask why. For a name I think she couldn’t decide between Grace and Rachel, and she only had one doll.

“And what’s this about?” Phyllis reached into the buggy and pulled up a quart jar with holes punched in the lid.

“For lightning bugs in case we need to see our way home,” Ruth Ann said. She always had a plan.

When we got to where the sidewalk started, it was evening under the trees. We came past the church. A lot of the plastic sheeting over the windows had blown out.

Farther along, the lights of uptown flickered, and the red light on top of the grain elevator across the tracks. The evening St. Louis to Chicago train roared through with its Vista Dome cars all lit up. People having dinner in the dining car blurred past. The town trembled.

There was a hole in the business block where the cafe used to be. Now it was a Dairy Queen frozen custard stand, buzzing with fluorescent lights. Not that we had any loose change for a frozen custard. But it was the only place in town to be.
Cars and Harleys were pulled up. Even a tractor. Kids hung around. Big kids. A lot of denim and boots.

“Keep walking,” Phyllis said out of the side of her mouth.

Girls and guys lounged around in their separate groups. The guys were all buzz cuts and ducktails. Everybody was a ghastly color from the fluorescent light, like from another planet. Gum stopped snapping when we came on the scene.

From a car radio Elvis Presley’s voice wavered out:

“If you cain’t come around, at least, please, uh, telyphone.”

Phyllis quivered slightly at the sound of Elvis’s voice. But she pulled herself together. “Stroll,” she mouthed. “Don’t hurry.”

I wanted to break into a run. The crowd parted for us a little. A very little. A brassy girl with kind of rowdy red hair leaned right over Ruth Ann’s doll buggy for a better look at Phyllis. I was working hard not to meet anybody’s stare.

The cars pulled up were mostly pre-war Plymouths and a couple of muddy trucks. Sprawled across the hood of an old DeSoto was a big galoot propped up on his elbows. I was looking right at him, and I’d know that face anywhere. Those eyes. One blue. One green.

Roscoe Burdick. A cigarette wedged over his ear, and a cigarette pack was folded up into his T-shirt sleeve. Lucky
Strikes. But he didn’t even see me. He only had eyes for Phyllis. He worked his chin from sideburn to sideburn with one of his big thorny hands and gave her a deep blue-and-green stare. It was like he’d never seen a girl before. The other girls were looking her over too, up and down, up and down. It took us about a year and a half to stroll past the whole bunch.

When we were finally down by the Stubbs & Askew insurance agency, a long low wolf whistle came out of the crowd behind us. Then a lot of hee-haw laughing. Then Elvis again, moaning out of a tinny car radio, “Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s . . .”

We moved on into the night to the last slab of sidewalk. The town ran out, and there was the school out in a field. It was a new yellow brick, since the war. A consolidated school with a lot of blacktop for the buses. The rope pinged on the flagpole. You could feel the whole place hunkered down in the dark, just waiting for tomorrow.

“What’s that, Bobby?” Ruth Ann pulled up her buggy.

“That’s it,” I told her. “School. We’ll all three be in the same building.” I figured she’d like that.

“Us?” she said in a wispy voice. “When?”

Phyllis sighed one of Mother’s sighs. Even I saw the problem. All along Ruth Ann had been thinking that after summer was over, we’d go back to Terre Haute, and everything would be the way it used to be. She’d only laid out her school clothes because Phyllis did. She was barely six
and sort of lived in her own world. Sometimes we forgot to spell things out for her. It was dark, but you knew she was getting teary.