A Season of Gifts (7 page)

Mrs. Dowdel had already released Barbara Jean from the steel jaws of a spring-action rabbit trap, which had a good firm hold on her where it hurts most.

Now the red light on the police chief’s Dodge lit up everything. There was enough light to explain any Unexplained Presence. Mrs. Dowdel stood with one hand on her hip, and the shotgun in the crook of her other arm. She’d raised one flap on her cap to hear what Police Chief C. P. Snokes had to say.

He was as well-armed as she was. But she could out-draw him. “Doggone it, Mrs. Dowdel, discharging a firearm within the city limits is a crime.”

“So’s trespassing.” Mrs. Dowdel nodded down at Barbara
Jean still sprawled among the melons. “Anyhow, who says we’re inside the city limits?”

A crowd was gathering out at the edge of the light, people from all around the neighborhood in the darnedest array of sleepwear you ever saw.

“The County Surveyor says so,” C. P. Snokes said. “You know yourself the city limits is that woven-wire fence that runs along the west side of your property.”

“Do tell.” Mrs. Dowdel poked at her fire with a big shoe. “You talking white man’s law? I’d say this ancient Kickapoo burial ground was here long before the first so-called pioneers.”

C. P. Snokes scratched up under his cap. “Mrs. Dowdel, are you telling me you live on an Indian reser—”

“I reserve the right to protect my property is what I’m telling you. Run that gal in,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Read her her rights and book her like they do on the television.”

C. P. Snokes’s flashlight revealed a no-nonsense, heavy-duty patented rabbit trap nearby Barbara Jean. “That’s a mean-lookin’ rabbit trap,” C. P. Snokes said.

“But legal,” Mrs. Dowdel said.

“Catch many rabbits?”

“Caught one tonight,” she said. “Looks like a snowshoe hare.”

Sure enough, in the flashlight’s beam Barbara Jean looked a lot like a scared white rabbit in plastic hair curlers and
shorty pajamas. Her eyes were pink in the glare. Her nose twitched, though she was still too scared to cry.

C. P. Snokes got a good look at her. “Doggone it, I can’t run her in.”

“How come?” Mrs. Dowdel said.

“She’s the Jeeter girl, the doctor’s daughter. And her mama was a—”

“I know what her mama was,” Mrs. Dowdel said. “Tell her to keep her gal home at night. My motto is, ‘Ready, Fire, Aim.’ Keep that in mind. Next time there won’t be enough of her left to initiate.”

That pretty well rounded out the night. C. P. Snokes put Barbara Jean in his Dodge. Now she was crying buckets, though he was only taking her home to the Jeeters out on the LaPlace road. The seat of her shorty pajamas hung in tatters. Barbara Jean was crying her eyes out, but she had a good grip on a medium-sized acorn squash.

Mrs. Dowdel kicked ashes on her embers and went on up to the house, the Winchester over her arm. In these last hours before dawn, the town tried to settle.

I couldn’t, and was still wide-awake to hear a stealthy foot on the stairs. I peered out of my room just as Phyllis’s form vanished into hers. I followed.

She nearly jumped over the bed when I turned up there on her heels. Still, she had the sense not to scream. The envelope to a letter she was writing to Elvis Presley was on her table:

She moved between me and it. But I had reason to know she signed all her letters to Elvis,

Love me tender, Phyllis

Ruth Ann slept with a night-light. The Elvises loomed over her. The Elvis over Phyllis’s bed glowed in the dark. It was from the
Jailhouse Rock
movie.

“Close that door,” Phyllis whispered at me. “What are you doing up at this—”

“The whole town’s up,” I whispered back. “Big doings in the melon patch. Haunts, gunfire, sorority girls, the law. You can’t hear yourself think. We thought you went to bed early.”

“I did,” Phyllis said, somewhat shifty. “Then I got up and . . . went on a hayride.”

“I thought the Future Farmers hayride was next weekend.”

“It is,” Phyllis whispered, not looking me in the eye.

There were little bits of straw and hay all over her, from her barrettes to her penny loafers. Her rolled-up jeans were dusty with chaff.

“Mother and Dad didn’t know you sneaked out,” I accused.

“I didn’t sneak out,” she said. “I left quietly. I’m fourteen. I have a life to live. In many important ways I’m practically twenty.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And clear out of my room,” Phyllis whispered. It loomed pink around us. “Ruth Ann will wake up, and it’ll be your fault.”

We glanced across the pink stripe to Ruth Ann’s side. She was this little mound in the bed, snoring lightly, with one small hand on top of the covers. A drying hollyhock doll nestled by her chin.

“For Pete’s sake,” Phyllis murmured, “what are those feathers doing all around her bed? It looks like a pheasant flew in here and blew up.”

T
he town was all eyes and ears, and the countryside heard all about it. The Kickapoo Princess had gone overnight from rumor to sure thing. Being high school girls, the witnesses weren’t reliable. But there was a bunch of them, and they sang like canaries.

It was a story that had everything: ghosts, gunplay, and Civil Defense.

WHAT’S GOING ON IN A RURAL
PIATT COUNTY MELON PATCH?

a headline in the
Champaign Courier
inquired.

ARE OUR DISTANT EARLY WARNING DEFENSE SYSTEMS ENOUGH?

People who couldn’t find us on a map beat a path to our door. Traffic backed up, and the newspapers of Arcola, Sullivan, and DeWitt County sent reporters.

Woody’s Zephyr Oil filling station pumped gas around the clock. The Dairy Queen took on extra help and was talking about putting in a drive-through. A lot of money changed hands.

Barbara Jean Jeeter’s mother kept her out of school for a week, saying she had a beast of a cold and possibly bronchitis.

To cash in, Mrs. Dowdel had set up shop out at the front of her property. It was a roadside stand featuring her jars of corn relish and apple butter and everything else out of her storm cellar. Piles of jars stood on hay bales, though she had no hay to bale. There were big bunches of bittersweet tied with fishing line. Shocks of Indian corn rose out of pumpkin piles. A few gawky dolls made out of cornhusks and yarn, with walnuts for faces.

A sign over a mountain of watermelon and mushmelon read:

PRODUCE FROM THE HAUNTED PATCH YOU PLUG ’EM YOU BOUGHT ’EM

Coffee cans held displays of pheasant feathers:

AUTHENTIC KICKAPOO HEADDRESS FEATHERS 5¢ APIECE 3 FOR A DIME

Mrs. Dowdel’s prices were steep, but she was making money hand over fist. Also, she was unusually chatty to reporters who wanted to interview her, though they had to buy a gallon jug of soft cider or a peck of peaches first.

You could hear her from our house, bending the reporters’ ears. “Pshaw, if you’re after a story, go down to the southern part of the state, down there at Cahokia. I know it’s the rough end of creation, but the old prehistoric people buried their folks in mounds down there. A good many has been dug up and put on display. Bones, of course. Go on down there and don’t bother me,” she’d say, and keep the change.

A small figure joined her after school, waiting on trade and darting back and forth for more gourds off the haunted vine at a dime apiece, a quarter for three. It was Ruth Ann in a cut-down version of Mrs. Dowdel’s feedsack apron, with pockets.

Mother kind of gave up and said, “At least I know where she is, and she doesn’t have to cross a busy street.” To work on his sermons, Dad had to move up in the attic. The traffic was deafening, and cars parked in our front yard.

Ruth Ann only came home in time for supper, bobbing through the cannas in an apron that brushed her sandals. She never came home empty-handed. She’d bring a mess of tomatoes too bruised to sell. Or a long-necked squash Mother could fry in butter. Now Ruth Ann was tying up her braids at the back of her head, since most of Mrs. Dowdel’s hair was drawn back in a big bun. Ruth Ann
carried a corn dolly in her apron pocket now that the hollyhocks were over. If you asked me, she was turning into a Mrs. Dowdel doll herself.

Mother tried to have little talks with her. “Honey, you’re a good little helper, bless your heart, but try to remember Mrs. Dowdel is old and can get confused in the things she says.”

“Pshaw,” Ruth Ann would say back, “this whole town is built where two old Indian trails crossed. The Kickapoos goin’ one way, the Illini the other. Hoo-boy, no wonder they’s restless spirits underfoot.” Then she’d poke at the bridge of her nose like she wore spectacles.

Mother sighed.

Mrs. Dowdel turned a tidy profit. Her apron got so saggy with loose change that she had to hang a berry pail from an army surplus ammo belt slung around her big middle.

*  *  *

Another rumor began to drift through town, lazy like the smoke off the burning leaves. You could probably have traced it back to Mrs. Dowdel herself. It was common knowledge that she didn’t trust banks, especially the Weidenbachs’ bank uptown. Still, she was spotted at the teller’s counter, picking up those papers you roll piles of quarters in. The bank gave them out free.

She was said to have folding money in stacks too—stacks and stacks. The exact amount grew in the telling. Her front room light burned late as she sat counting it, several said. Rumor reported that she was stashing her
treasure somewhere in her house. A loose floorboard in her grandson’s old bedroom was mentioned. Joey’s room. But witnesses were on the record that she’d been digging out in her melon patch in the darkest part of night. Who knew?

*  *  *

Finally Mrs. Dowdel had sold every melon and squash in her patch, every gourd off her vine. And all at top dollar. Her tomato plants were picked clean and ready to be dug under. The pheasant feathers had sold like hot cakes. They’d flown out of those coffee cans.

She’d feathered her nest for sure. Now you’d think she’d be hunkering down for winter and maybe paying to have her kindling split. But no.

She turned up at our kitchen door one night. A heavy clump on the porch, a thundering rap on the door, and there she was. From the table we saw the two moons of her specs agleam in the gloom. We jumped.

Supper was just over, and Phyllis was plotting her escape. Ruth Ann went to open the door, and we followed. Then we saw she wasn’t alone. An eerie face under a mashed hat peered around her. Cross-eyes peered at us and everywhere else, through a veil. It was Mrs. Wilcox of the wash-foot church.

Mrs. Dowdel leaned toward Mother and muttered, “I couldn’t shake her.” She jerked a thumb to indicate Mrs. Wilcox. “She’s all over me like a rubber girdle in a heatwave.”

“Oh, but you’re both as welcome as you can be,” Mother said. “Come in and take chairs.”

But that wasn’t going to happen. They came in, though, single-file. They were paying a call, so they had on their best aprons, with rickrack. Mrs. Wilcox’s eyes and teeth went in every direction. Something bulky hung in the crook of Mrs. Dowdel’s arm. Not her Winchester. It was a box, a little bigger than a shoebox.

Phyllis held back, trying not to be there. Ruth Ann and I were the only ones who’d seen Mrs. Dowdel this close, and I wasn’t admitting it. But she looked straight over my head like she’d never set eyes on me in her life. Ruth Ann’s apron was just like hers and Mrs. Wilcox’s. Phyllis was drifting farther off.

“I don’t neighbor,” Mrs. Dowdel announced, though she was handing Mother her last jar of pickled peaches.

“She don’t,” Mrs. Wilcox piped up.

“I’m here strictly on church business.”

“Strictly business,” Mrs. Wilcox echoed. “And no funny business.”

Mrs. Dowdel turned on Dad, who was fighting his way into his suit coat. “You can’t get a church up and goin’ without a good funeral first,” she told him. “Any fool could tell you that. Without a funeral, you ain’t got a chance in—”

“The world,” Mrs. Wilcox said. “I haven’t missed a funeral since the great flu epidemic. A good funeral makes the whole week go better.”

“I want me one,” Mrs. Dowdel said.

A grave silence fell over us. Was she talking about her
own funeral? Was she . . . planning ahead? Dad looked lost.

“And the . . . departed?” he asked, feeling his way.

“Oh well, shoot,” Mrs. Dowdel said—expostulated. “I brought her with me.”

Did she mean Mrs. Wilcox? Mrs. Wilcox stood there in Mrs. Dowdel’s big shadow. A toothpick wavered out between two of her teeth. She didn’t look ready to depart, quite.

But Mrs. Dowdel was sliding the box out of the crook of her arm. It was wrapped up in a piece of old rug or an Indian blanket, something ragged and sewed together with thongs. It was roped around, and there was some beadwork stuck on.

“I’m sick to death of all this fussin’ and fumin’ about restless spirits and floatin’ princesses and all such horse—”