A Long Way from Chicago

“Are my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.”

“You a newspaper reporter?” she said. “Peoria?” It was the flashy clothes, but he looked surprised.

Though she didn’t gloat, she looked satisfied. It certainly fleshed out her reputation and gave people new reason to leave her in peace. The story of Shotgun Cheatham’s last night above aground kept The Coffee Pot Café fully engaged for the rest of our visit that summer. It was a story that grew in the telling in one of those little towns where there’s always time to ponder all the different kinds of truth.

“What’s come over you?” Grandma said in her least interested voice.

Mrs. Wilcox whimpered. “Send them kids out of your kitchen so I can tell you.”

“They’re eating their breakfast,” Grandma said, “and they’re from Chicago, so they’ve heard everything.”

Then she turned from the door, and I saw the look on her face. You had to study hard to see any expression at all, but it was a look I was coming to know. She appeared pretty satisfied at the way things had turned out. And she’d returned law and order to the town she claimed she didn’t give two hoots about.

They didn’t thank her. She wasn’t looking for thanks.

“Mrs. Dowdel,” the sheriff boomed, “I wouldn’t know what to charge you with first. You’re a one-woman crime wave. Where’d you get them fish, for instance?” he said, widely overlooking the home brews in the drifters’ hands.

“Out of a trap in Salt Crick,” Grandma remarked, “Same as you get yours.”

“I don’t think Grandma’s a very good influence on us,” Mary Alice said. It had taken her a while to come to that conclusion, and I had to agree. It reconciled us some to our trips to visit her.

“Mrs. Dowdel, I’ll come clean. I don’t think I better enter my bread-and-butter pickles this year, and I’m going to tell you why. The depression is upon us. Times are hard.”

“They was never easy for me,” Grandma recalled.

“And quite unfairly,” Mrs. Weidenbach said, “people blame the bankers.”

“My stars,” Grandma said. “The bank forecloses on people’s farms and throws them off their land, and they don’t even appreciate it.”

At length, she said, “I cook to eat, not to show off.”

She waved us over. “We’re makin’ soap.”

Until we started coming to Grandma’s, we thought soap was a pink bar that came out of a wrapper labeled Cashmere Bouquet. But that cost seven cents, and Grandma made her own.

“Killed a brakeman on the freight train and both engineers. Oh, you never saw such a mess.” Grandma shook her head. “I was only a babe in arms, but I remember it well. My maw walked the tracks down there and held me up to see it. They’d pried the locomotives apart and taken out the dead. But it was a sight to behold. They said the dead bodies looked like they’d been fed through a sausage grinder.”

I swallowed hard, but I was always interested in anything from her early life that might help explain Grandma.

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.

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 quiet without her, and Grandma will like that.”

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

“Vampires? No. The only bloodsuckers is the banks.” Grandma stroked her chins. “Movies is all pretend. They’re made in California, you know. But they prove a point. Make something seem real, and people will believe it. The public will swallow anything.”

“Mrs. Dowdel, that’s not business,” the banker said. “That’s blackmail.”

“What’s the difference?” Grandma said.

“Got a new pet?” I inquired.

“Chicago people have pets,” she said. “But there’s a new litter living down in the cobhouse now, and I let ‘em. They keep down the vermin. Don’t need all of them though.” Gently, she lifted the kitten and put her in the hamper with our lunch. “We’ll drown this one in the crick on our way,” she said. But I wasn’t worried.

“How do you know Mother’s going to let you keep that kitten?”

“How do you know she’s not?” said Mary Alice.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

She stood at her door, large as life—larger, framed against the light from her front room. Grandma was there, watching through the watches of the night for the train to pass through. She couldn’t know what car I was in, but her hand was up, and she was waving—waving big at all the cars, hoping I’d see.

And I waved back. I waved long after the window filled with darkness and long distance.