A Season of Gifts (5 page)

“It’ll be all right,” Phyllis told her. “You’ll be in first grade, and everybody will be new. And you know your numbers and your letters. It’ll be fine. Little kids aren’t as mean as big kids.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. But I gave Phyllis credit for saying so.

Ruth Ann gripped her buggy handle. Her knuckles were white in the dark. “Then we’re staying here?” Her voice wobbled.

Phyllis and I both sighed.

“But how will he find me?” Ruth Ann said.

“Who?” we said.

“You know who,” Ruth Ann said. “You know perfectly well.”

I didn’t. But Phyllis rolled her eyes, then caught mine. Over Ruth Ann’s head she quietly spelled out a couple of words, a name.

“S-A-N-T-A,” Phyllis spelled, “C-L-A-U-S.”

*  *  *

We weren’t about to walk home past the Dairy Queen again. We picked a darker street. People didn’t sit out on their porches much anymore. A blue television glow came out of nearly every house and frosted the yard.

Even in Terre Haute we hadn’t had a television set.

Some people thought it wasn’t the kind of thing a preacher’s family should have. It didn’t set a good example. Anyway, Mother said it was bad for our eyes.

So on nights this dark back in Terre Haute we’d scouted around the neighborhood till we found a television in plain sight through a front window. We’d stand in their bushes and watch it.

Now we were at it again.

We came to a blue-lit window. The curtains were open, but the shrubs were low and sparse, so we’d be in the open. Still, we veered off the sidewalk and drifted up to the house. Phyllis and I made a cradle seat with our hands, and Ruth Ann climbed aboard.

We hoisted her up, and now we were these three heads at the window. But it was okay. The people in there were facing away to the screen, eating popcorn. You could smell melted butter. They were watching an advertisement for a car. A commercial. Words appeared on the screen.

“What do they say?” Ruth Ann whispered.

“There’s a Ford in your future,” I read. “Make sure it’s an Edsel.”

The screen jumped to wrestling. Ruth Ann bounced. She loved wrestling. Phyllis didn’t. She was always wanting it to be Sunday night and Elvis making a surprise appearance on the
Ed Sullivan Show.

But wrestling was good because you didn’t need to
hear anything. The wrestlers boomeranged off the ropes and into each other. They were big bruisers. The biggest, blondest, baddest was named Gorgeous George, a major star.

“Kill him, Gorgeous,” Ruth Ann whispered. “Twist off his ears.” There was a whistle in her whisper because she was missing her two front teeth. “Take him apart, limb from limb,” she whispered, making little fists.

“Come on, let’s go,” Phyllis murmured. “I can’t hold her any longer. I’m numb.”

Ruth Ann dropped into a shrub, and we stole away.

Now we were running out of sidewalk and only a turning from home. Ruth Ann jumped for lightning bugs, but they were all out of reach. It was getting late, and it was a school night.

But then we came to a house with a good strong blue glow through thick evergreens. It was too good to pass up, and dark as pitch under the trees of the yard. We crept forth, close, like some six-legged creature of the night. You couldn’t see where your feet went.

I tripped over something, like a leaf bag but bigger. I made some sound.

“Shut up,” Phyllis whispered. What had I fallen over? It felt like a gunny sack stuffed tight with something. I reached around inside.

“What is it?” Phyllis whispered.

“Ears of corn,” I said.

We edged around it. Ruth Ann clung to us. The glow from a big screen beamed through the branches. We edged up till pine needles poked our faces. It began to smell like Christmas.

We were only one branch from the house when we saw it. The shape. A figure stood in the shrubs, looking in the window. There before us and way bigger. Darker than the night.

My blood ran cold. Phyllis’s hands clamped her mouth and Ruth Ann’s. We froze. I was scared speechless. The shrubbery was a cage now, and the branches were claws. The massive back of the black figure was as near us as I am to you and big as a bear. Its huge, thick arms came up, turning and twisting against the blue light. Ruth Ann clung. The figure bobbed and weaved, mirroring Gorgeous George on the television inside as he worked over his helpless victims. At least it’s a sports fan, I thought.

A hand closed over my arm. I flinched. It was Phyllis. She seemed to jerk her head. We needed to edge back very light on our feet. The big figure before us was still grabbing for night air, still ducking, helping Gorgeous George tie his enemies in knots.

Step by step we eased out of the bushes, skirting the corn sack. Ruth Ann was as silent as the ghost of a girl. We walked backward to the first tree and the doll buggy. Then
we lit out. When our porch light was in sight, Phyllis drew up, fighting for breath.

“I’m scared,” Ruth Ann whimpered. “What did you bring me for?”

“You know who that was, don’t you?” Phyllis said. “That . . . figure at the window. It was Mrs. Dowdel.”

I guessed it made sense. Like us, she didn’t have her own television. Or any sweet corn in her garden. Looked like she’d been harvesting it by night out of somebody else’s. Then she’d stopped to go a round or two along with Gorgeous George. Phyllis moaned.

“This town,” she said, hopeless, “this town . . .”

A car went past, slow. It was one-eyed. I’d have thought it must be an old DeSoto with a slipping clutch and a Hollywood muffler. It gunned into open country, and the dark swallowed its taillights.

Personally I thought it was time to call it a night. Ruth Ann began to unpack her buggy. She stopped. I can still see her hands hovering over the doll blanket in the porch light.

“Grachel’s gone,” she said in her smallest voice. It was a bad moment.

“Feel around in there for her,” Phyllis said.

“She’s gone,” Ruth Ann said.

“Maybe she fell out,” I said. “Maybe—”

“She was wedged in under the bug jar,” Phyllis murmured.

“She didn’t fall out,” Ruth Ann said. “I know where she went.”

“Where?”

“Back to Terre Haute where he can find her. She went home. I wish I could.”

We never saw the doll buggy again. I guess Ruth Ann put it in the pile to go to Goodwill, where it came from to begin with. I guess she didn’t want it around.

I
walked Ruth Ann home after the first day of school. She looked a little pale, a little droopy. But she’d hung on to her Davy Crockett lunch bucket. Which was better than what happened to me. Two big bozos who were repeating sixth grade stole my lunch.

They were Newt Fluke and Elmo Leaper, Jr. Both about five ten, and Newt shaved. They also happened to be a couple of the big uglies who’d thrown me into Salt Crick. Anyway, I’d saved back an apple in my desk, the way you do when you’re not one of the bigger kids.

Ruth Ann took my hand across the street, and I let her. Nobody was looking.

“How’d you like first grade?” I asked because she wasn’t saying.

“It was all right. We cut out fall leaves from construction paper,” she said. “But I thought by afternoon we’d be reading. What are nits?”

Nits? “Ah,” I said. “Well, they’re louse eggs or baby louses. Lice. Something like that. Why?”

“The teacher checked in our hair for them.”

Oh. “Did she find any?”

“She found a lot on a girl named Ida-Belle Eubanks. My desk has a name.”

“Roscoe?”

Ruth Ann nodded.

*  *  *

Mrs. Dowdel had fired up her cauldron that afternoon. I noticed from my window when I was upstairs messing around in my room. She was boiling shucked sweet corn in batches. She pitchforked the ears in and out. Smoke billowed up around her.

I looked again, and there was Ruth Ann on the far side of the cannas. Mother had captured her long enough to get her out of her school dress and into coveralls. Now Ruth Ann was over by the hollyhocks, already deep into Mrs. Dowdel’s territory.

She’d pulled off a few blossoms to make up a little family of hollyhock dolls. Without Grachel, Ruth Ann was kind of lost and alone in the world. She used hollyhock buds for heads and upside-down flowers for the skirts. That kind of business. Toothpicks for arms.

Ruth Ann was helping herself to the hollyhocks, and Mrs. Dowdel was pitchforking her bubbling corn. The distance was narrowing between them. But each one was in a separate world—busy.

Then pretty soon Mrs. Dowdel dropped her pitchfork and headed off to her cobhouse. She practically ran Ruth Ann down. But neither one paid any attention to the other. When Mrs. Dowdel came back, she was lugging a crate with something on top. A big mixing bowl? Who knows? She did all kinds of things in her yard most people do indoors.

She planted the bowl on the ground and tipped the crate. Something rolled out. From up here it looked like a rusty hubcap, but bigger. It was there in the grass. Then it moved, by itself. Ruth Ann watched.

It was a turtle, a great big thing. It started crawling toward the fire, thought better of that, and made a slow turtle-turn. Mrs. Dowdel stood over it, keeping an eye on it, taking her time. Ruth Ann was right there, in her shadow.

There was a stick in Mrs. Dowdel’s hand, no longer than a clothespin. She bent to tease the turtle with it, and I guess he fell for it. I couldn’t really see from up here, but he stuck his neck out of his shell. Bad idea. A turtle will take your finger off, especially if you bother it. Mrs. Dowdel, bent double, invited the turtle to take a bite out of the stick she was offering between two careful fingers.

Ruth Ann tucked her fingers into her armpits. She was all eyes.

The turtle must have chomped down on the stick, because Ruth Ann jumped.

Out of her apron Mrs. Dowdel drew a businesslike knife. It flashed once, and the turtle, who wouldn’t stop biting the stick, couldn’t pull his head back in his shell. The head flew. Ruth Ann jumped a foot. With a big shoe Mrs. Dowdel kicked the turtle head into the fire.

Now she was squatting in the yard. A turtle can crawl till sunset after it’s lost its head. She flipped it over, and it lolled.

I couldn’t see this part at all, but Mrs. Dowdel had gone to work running the knife around the shell to cut it loose from the skin, sawing in a circle. I could only see this happening in Ruth Ann’s face. She was as interested as she’d ever been in anything in her life.

Mrs. Dowdel seemed to work the skin off the turtle’s feet. She lifted the shell like the lid off a stew pot and set it rolling away toward a garden row. Ruth Ann watched it go.

Finally Mrs. Dowdel heaved herself upright. With a small mess of turtle guts in her cupped hands, she went over to the fire and threw them in. Ruth Ann’s mouth hung open. She was all eyes and mouth. Even her braids looked interested.

Mrs. Dowdel worked over the rest of the turtle, carving up the parts you can eat to fry for her supper. She didn’t
bring over any for us, but there’s not a lot of eating in one turtle.

But the point is from that day on, the afternoon of the turtle, Ruth Ann was Mrs. Dowdel’s shadow. And Mrs. Dowdel let her be. Ever after, Ruth Ann seemed to forget she’d ever lived in Terre Haute, or anywhere but here.

Phyllis didn’t get home till five on that particular afternoon. There’d been high school meetings about upcoming fall events: a sock hop, a hayride, corn-husking, homecoming. Somebody gave her a ride home.

*  *  *

Counting us Barnharts, nine people showed up at Dad’s first service that next Sunday. I ushered, wearing a white shirt and a necktie of Dad’s. It was longer than my fly. I could have put everybody in one pew, but I scattered them around. Still, Dad could count, and it wasn’t much of a turnout.

One lady wore a Mackinaw jacket and a hat with a veil. Her eyes were all over the place, and her teeth came out to meet you.

“I ain’t Methodist,” she warned me as I steered her at a pew. “I’m from the church across the tracks, so I’m wash-foot. I’m just here to see how the heathens worship.” She grinned quite friendly through her veil, and her teeth were a real assortment. She said she was Mrs. Wilcox.

Mother sat up front in her summer dress. Next to her
was Ruth Ann with six or eight hollyhock dolls to fill out the pew. Phyllis sat on the back row, writing a letter. I passed the plate. Pollen blew in through the torn windows. Dad said, “Let us make a joyful noise,” and we tried a hymn, “Blessed Assurance.” But we tapered off.

Dad cut his sermon short so we’d be out ahead of the United Brethren. The wash-foot congregation across the tracks went on for another hour. Mrs. Wilcox had time to catch it on her way home.

After church we counted out the offering on our kitchen table. A dollar twelve, and two meat ration tokens from World War II and a small scattering of S&H Green Stamps.

“Great oaks from little acorns grow,” Dad said, not too certain. Mother didn’t look certain at all.

Mrs. Dowdel hadn’t turned up, but it was well known that she wasn’t a church woman. Where would she find the time? As the fall days got shorter, hers got longer. She’d put up a carload of corn relish. The labels on the Ball jars were written out in a hand that looked like Ruth Ann’s printing, though she’d had help with the spelling.