A Long Way From Chicago (13 page)

Grandma gazed. Of all the invasions of her privacy, this one took the cake.

“For the love of Pete!” Mrs. Stubbs looked up, shading her eyes. “It’s that trashy Eubanks woman trying to get her girl back. I hope she does! I hope she takes her home and sticks her down the well!”

Miz Eubanks had to notice the yard below had filled up with people. But now she had the screen loose and was ducking under to get inside. She had one knee on the sill.

That’s as far as she got. Grandma strolled over and took the ladder in both hands. She jerked it free of the ground, and it fell, scraping down the house.

It must have seemed to Miz Eubanks that the world had dropped out from under her. She had one knee on the windowsill and the rest of her was in space. She grabbed the window screen, and it came with her as she fell.

She was in the air a long moment, turning as she dropped, legs working hard. Then she crashed through the snowball bushes, still clutching the screen.

“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Mr. Stubbs cried, “and she’s not insured!”

The top of a nodding snowball had snagged her sunbonnet,
but Miz Eubanks herself was down among the roots, beginning to crawl out from under the bushes that had broken her fall. Again she was wheezing.

Forgetting their differences, Mr. Stubbs would have gone to her aid. But Mrs. Stubbs took him in hand and headed to their Ford. Over her shoulder Mrs. Stubbs called back, “I hope this puts an end to the entire unfortunate business. And I don’t want any more interference from you, Mrs. Dowdel!”

“Get in the car, Lula,” Mr. Stubbs said. And they gunned away as fast as a Ford goes.

Miz Eubanks sat in the yard, dazed. Grandma stood above her. “There’s my property line,” she said, pointing it out. “Get over it.”

Miz Eubanks limped away, steaming. Where she’d parked her mule I didn’t know, if it was still alive. She turned around just off Grandma’s territory. “You done abdicated my girl,” she howled, “but I’ll git her back. You watch!”

I looked up at the bedroom window with the missing screen. A face appeared there briefly, ghostly pale. And it wasn’t Skipper the puppy.

By eight o’clock that night the whole town knew everything. Defying his parents, Lula and Merle, Junior Stubbs was known to be in Grandma’s cobhouse, waiting to make his move. And Vandalia Eubanks, tucked away upstairs in Grandma’s house, was ready to make hers, in spite of her half-cracked mother, Idella.

The Wabash Cannonball train was due through on its run between Detroit and St. Louis. It was going to make
its usual quick stop at 8:17, and the runaway couple were going to elope on it. Everybody said so.

The Coffee Pot Cafe was doing its best business in several years because its front windows looked out on the depot. Word had spread, and people had driven in from all over the county to witness the showdown. The Stubbses meant to be on the platform to talk Junior out of it. The whole Eubanks clan was coming to town to get Vandalia back. Nobody agreed on how many big brothers she had, but there were several.

Things didn’t go according to plan, though. When the Wabash Cannonball steamed in on schedule, the town bulged with people, but the lovebirds, Junior and Vandalia, were absent.

The Cannonball pulled out without them, leaving Merle and Lula Stubbs and all the Eubankses milling on the platform. The train gathered speed past Grandma’s house, and Grandma was at the front door to see it go through. Mary Alice watched from an upstairs bedroom window.

But then with a piercing shriek that rent the evening air, the powerful locomotive set its brakes. It skidded a quarter of a mile before it could come to a stop.

There was a little haze that night, a little mist. Down by the haunted timber a deathly figure stood, shrouded in black, swinging an old-time lantern. The Phantom Brakeman seemed to hover between the tracks, dimly bathed in yellow lantern light. The engineer stuck his head out of the locomotive and stared down the track with widening eyes. Before he could send the fireman to
investigate, the ghastly figure had vanished in the haze, melted in the mist.

But it gave Vandalia and Junior their chance. They came up, hand in hand, from the other side of the Wabash tracks and scrambled aboard the open platform at the back of the parlor car. When the Cannonball pulled out again, they were on it, together at last.

That was one night Grandma didn’t have to wake herself up to go to bed. As I came in the front room, she was there in her platform rocker, saying to Mary Alice, “Next time you bring a stray home, make it a puppy.”

Mary Alice stared.

“You can call it Skipper,” Grandma suggested.

“How’d you know—”

“I heard you tell your brother that Vandalia Eubanks was a puppy. I can hear all over the house. I got ears on me like an Indian scout. And I don’t sleep.”

Grandma looked up at me. “Get everything squared away?” she asked.

And yes, I had. I’d taken off Grandpa Dowdel’s big old black overcoat and put it back in the cobhouse with the old lantern, where I’d found them.

1934

W
hen we got down off the train, Grandma was there on the platform. After our first visit she’d never met us at the train, figuring we could find our own way. But here she was, under her webby old black umbrella to shade her from the sun.

But she wasn’t there to meet us. She was seeing somebody off. A lady was climbing up into the car behind ours. We caught only a squint in the dazzling light, but knew the hat. It was Mrs. Effie Wilcox. With a powerful arm, Grandma swung Mrs. Wilcox’s bulging valise aboard, then a picnic hamper. She stepped back as the Blue Bird pulled out. She didn’t wave, but scanned the windows to see if Mrs. Wilcox found a seat. Then Grandma turned to us.

You could never call her a welcoming woman, but today her mind was truly miles away. I was falling behind with our suitcase, though this year I was nearly as tall as Grandma herself.

“Was Mrs. Wilcox going on a trip?” Mary Alice inquired.

“She’s gone for good,” Grandma said. “Off to double up with her sister at Palmyra. Bank’s foreclosing on her house, so she lit out, not wanting to watch them dump her stuff in the road. After Wilcox died, she left the farm and bought that house in town. But she can’t keep up with the payments.”

At noon dinner that day Mary Alice and I distracted Grandma with all the excitement we’d left behind in Chicago. In July they’d killed John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One. He’d been on a long spree, robbing banks throughout the middle west. The public didn’t know whether they wanted him caught or not. He’d provided a lot of entertainment in hard times. Since he stole from banks, he was called a Robin Hood, though he wasn’t known for giving to the poor.

He’d gone to a picture show at the Biograph Theatre not far from our neighborhood. With him were two bad women, and one of them tipped off the cops, who filled him full of lead on the sidewalk. Then, to prove they’d finally nailed John Dillinger, the police put his body on display in the morgue basement. People trooped past for a look. Women dipped their handkerchiefs in his bloody wounds for souvenirs. But he was so bloated and shot up that some people said it wasn’t Dillinger at all. Rumor had it that he was holed up somewhere.

Mary Alice and I had sulked because neither Mother nor Dad would take us to view the riddled corpse. Recalling to ourselves Shotgun Cheatham, we thought we could take it. When we got back to school in September, everybody would say they’d seen the cadaver. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lost.

“I’d have took you,” Grandma said. We didn’t doubt it. Grandma wouldn’t have minded a look for herself at all that remained of John Dillinger.

Mary Alice and I went upstairs to sort out our clothes from the single suitcase. She was getting particular about how everything she wore had to be hung up on a hanger just so. “Grandma’s missing Mrs. Wilcox,” she mentioned.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s Grandma’s worst enemy. She says Mrs. Wilcox’s tongue is attached in the middle and flaps at both ends. The town’ll be quieter without her, and Grandma will like that.”

“You don’t know anything,” Mary Alice said. “Men don’t have any idea about women.”

So I loped uptown by myself, heading for Veech’s Gas and Oil, which was man’s country. Ray Veech ran the garage when his dad was farming, and I thought I had some business with him.

The town was half-asleep with August and the depression. A checker game was going on in The Coffee Pot Cafe as I went past, but nothing else. A knot of people outside Moore’s Store waited for the day-old bread to go half-price.

In the window of Stubbs & Askew, the insurance agency, you could put up handbills. The biggest was a drawing of the giant farm implement shed that Deere &
Company was proposing to put up on the block where the old brickyard had been.

Next to it a handbill advertised a rummage sale at the United Brethren Church:

BRING & BUY

Treasures, Trash, Bric-a-Brac

Down-to-Earth Prices

Lunch Provided by Our Ladies’ Circle

The last handbill was a schedule of the movies the Lions Club was showing at their outdoor picture show. They weren’t new movies. Some of them weren’t even talkies. It looked like a slow week.