A Season of Gifts (6 page)

CORN RELISH
1958

It was getting harder to keep Ruth Ann home. Mother about gave up trying.

A jar of corn relish rolled all the way over onto our porch. The tarp I’d once worn was stretched on Mrs. Dowdel’s side yard, thick with drying black walnuts. The stove lengths began to rise in piles on her back porch. She could see winter from here.

I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t see a day ahead. Typical of me, the next time trouble broke out next door, I was sound asleep.

E
vidently Mrs. Dowdel always had extra trouble in the fall of the year. Nameless figures were known to sneak down behind the houses to her patch and swipe her melons. It was kind of a local tradition. Dating couples had been flushed out of this same location.

The town knew Mrs. Dowdel was armed and dangerous. But high school kids would figure that trying to steal a half-ripe watermelon was worth the risk of getting your head blown off.

Even after her long days, Mrs. Dowdel sat guard down there. You could see her on sentry duty from our back porch. She made herself pretty comfortable. There was a nip in the air now, but she’d put together a little stove from cinder-blocks and an oven rack. A pot of camp coffee brewed on
the grille. She buried baking potatoes under the fire. There she hunkered on two overturned pails in a cap with flaps and three or four afghans. Her melons and squash were coming on. Behind her on the vines climbing the cobhouse, her gourds were ready.

So was she. The Winchester was always across her big knees, unless she was cleaning it by firelight.

Maybe sitting out in the hazy night, watching the sparks rise to join the stars, gave Mrs. Dowdel ideas. Maybe she even saw weird visions in the firelight’s flicker. Who knows?

A rumor about that particular melon patch began to drift through town. At first it wasn’t louder than the whisper of dry leaves. A word here. A word there. It could have come from anywhere. Then it broke into print in the county seat newspaper. A column called “News From Our Outlying Communities” appeared in the
Piatt County Call:

After this news broke, the rumor of spooky doings in the melon patch spread far out into the county.

A steady line of cars and trucks edged along our street every evening, bumper to bumper. People craned their necks for a glimpse of anything they could see. Flashbulbs popped from backseats. Mrs. Dowdel’s cobhouse blocked most of the view. But people could see the glow of her campfire like an eerie halo above.

“You children,” Mother said in a weary voice, “keep completely out of this. Where’s Ruth Ann?”

In a day or two the police chief and the newspaper were swamped with reports of strange lights in the night and sudden sounds.

We Barnharts were used to sudden sounds by now. It was the hunting season, at least in Mrs. Dowdel’s mind. Pintails, mallards, teals, the first of the migrating Canada geese often flapped their last over her property. Any time before dark you were apt to hear the full voice of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Then something on the wing would stop short in the sky and drop like a rock. And whether it was actually pheasant season or not, it was too late to warn the pheasant.

Another week or so, and rumors of the ghost princess began to blend with last year’s big news. People remembered how the Russians had sent their two Sputnik rockets into orbit, one with a dog riding in it. This brought back the topic of flying saucers.

Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, granted an interview with the
Piatt County Call.
She spoke for the membership of the Daughters of the American Revolution, saying:

Over on the high school side, the kids were abuzz. They’d all trespassed on the haunted melon patch at one time or another. But nobody could finger the couples who’d left the Thunderbird wine and picnic blankets and transistor radios behind when the Kickapoo Princess scared them off. A few began to remember they’d seen something they couldn’t put a name to in the melon patch. They milled in the school halls and couldn’t settle. Test scores dropped. A Boy Scout troop working toward Eagle said there ought to be a badge for Ghost Spotting.

The whole matter might have died down, with football season and corn-husking and high school homecoming on the way. But things took another turn on a certain moonless night. And it wasn’t Boy Scouts. It was girls, a bunch of them. I slept through most of it, up till the screaming and gunfire. But by daybreak the whole town had all the particulars.

Though high school sororities weren’t allowed, there
was
one, run by a redhead named Waynetta Blalock. Her mother had been a Lovejoy, and they owned the hybrid seed corn and the grain elevator. The sorority was Iota Nu Beta, which some people said stood for I Oughta Know Better.

This was the time of year Iota Nu Beta initiated new freshmen girls. Not Phyllis. She said herself she wasn’t eligible since she couldn’t wear makeup and only had two skirts. Waynetta had said all over school that Phyllis was “poor as a church mouse and anyhow not
from
here.”

Even down in the grades we heard all about the plans for a secret Iota Nu Beta initiation. Waynetta personally leaked word that it would take place in the vicinity of the Haunted Melon Patch.

On that moonless Friday night, according to eyewitnesses, the Iota Nu Beta girls met out behind our house, by our car. We had a car. We just didn’t have gas money for it, and it burned a quart of oil if you hit the starter. It was a 1950 Nash four-door. We called it the Pickle because of its shape. Also it was green.

From over by the parked Pickle the sorority girls could see across the cannas. There Mrs. Dowdel slumped asleep before her dying fire. Out there on flat ground she must have looked like the Rock of Gibraltar. Her shotgun lay broken open and was beginning to slip off her knees. The scene was silent as the grave except for a little ground wind rattling the gourd vine against the cobhouse.

The first girl to be initiated—first and last—was Barbara Jean Jeeter. She wore babydoll shorty pajamas and Spooly plastic curlers. She had to crawl out in the patch, steal a squash within range of Mrs. Dowdel, and crawl back. The other part of the initiation, to eat a lard sandwich and recite a dirty limerick, was slated for later back at Waynetta’s house.

Edna-Earl Stubbs and Vanette Pankey, the sorority sergeants at arms, gave Barbara Jean a kick to start her out. Even if she didn’t believe in ghosts, she had to believe in Mrs. Dowdel’s shotgun. So she belly-crawled low, and it would have been pretty dank down in that sandy soil for a girl dressed in as little as Barbara Jean was. But freshmen will do anything to belong.

Barbara Jean crept on, from melon to melon, from squash to squash. At this point eyewitness reports differ. Vanette Pankey said that even from the Pickle she heard a sound, a rattle of dried beans in a gourd. Edna-Earl Stubbs said no. The first sound was a distant drumbeat, very far-off. Boom, boom, boom—like that. Anyway, it didn’t wake Mrs. Dowdel.

Then we come to some real confusion. Firelight played against the cobhouse wall. The gourd vine cast fluttering shadows. Waynetta herself said she was the first to see somebody or something standing there, the vines grown up around her. Some creature of the night, or history. Not quite life-size, but definitely there. Another sorority girl said
no. The first sighting of the ghost was right up by Mrs. Dowdel, like it had just stepped out from behind her. Or floated. With firelight on its face.

Wrong, Edna-Earl said. She clearly saw the Kickapoo Princess descending from a great height, probably heaven or the Happy Hunting Ground. Edna-Earl saw a pair of beaded moccasins dangling a good six feet above the ground. Maybe higher.

They were all scared too speechless to warn Barbara Jean. But they all agreed on one point: The Kickapoo Princess was wearing a full feathered headdress and carried a pair of gourd rattles in her weirdly pale little hands. And they all said her hair was in braids.

Anyway, here came Barbara Jean through the melons, working along on her elbows. She was within reach of the dying fire and spotting for squash when she heard something or saw something. She jumped up before she thought, stumbled and fell back. Then sat down hard.

Everybody over by the Pickle heard a snapping sound. Barbara Jean sent up a scream that tore the night in two.

“HELP!” she shrieked. “I been grabbed. The ghost’s dragging me with her into her grave. SAVE ME!”

Barbara Jean was heard uptown. She certainly brought Mrs. Dowdel around. She vaulted out of deep sleep, and her pails went over behind her. She fished two shells out of her apron and fed them into the shotgun. Shouldering the butt of the gun into her afghans, she swung wildly.

“Hold your fire!” Barbara Jean screamed. “I’m already half buried, and the ghost is biting me right on my—”

KABOOM, KABOOM. Mrs. Dowdel fired twice. A tongue of red flame from each barrel licked the night. People all over the township called the chief of police.

Barbara Jean’s screams knocked me out of bed. Then the gunplay. When I came out of my room, the door to Phyllis and Ruth Ann’s was closed. How could they sleep through this? I wondered. Downstairs Mother and Dad were on the back porch, wearing blankets. The Pickle stood alone. Seeing a sorority sister in dire danger, the Iota Nu Betas had all hightailed it home to save their own skins. As president, Waynetta Blalock was no doubt in the lead.