A Long Way From Chicago Read Online Free PDF Page B

fear. He didn’t mind what his boys did to the town, but now he saw his business going down the drain, so to speak.
    “Mrs. Dowdel,” he said in a broken voice. “What do you want?”
    “Justice,” Grandma said.
    A pause fell upon them. Grandma and Mr. Cowgill seemed to have a moment of complete understanding.
    Then he said, “What’ll I use?”
    She nodded across the kitchen to the sink. In his earthly life Grandpa Dowdel had shaved over that sink. The mirror still hung there from his time, and beside it a long leather strop for sharpening the edge on his cutthroat razor.
    Mr. Cowgill edged around the kitchen table and pulled the strop off the wall. Then he left. Grandma and I filled the doorway to watch.
    It was dark out there, but you could see the lumpish shapes of the Cowgill boys hanging around the milk wagon, waiting for their paw. They didn’t have to wait a minute more.
    “Line up according to age,” he called out, snapping the long leather strop above his head. Then he whaled the tar out of every one of them. They squealed like stuck hogs while Mrs. Cowgill lamented from the milk wagon. He took each by the arm in turn and gave them all what for. You could tell when he got to Ernie because a wavering voice cried out, “I’m dead.”
    At last the milk wagon clattered out of the yard. Grandma stayed at the door as peace descended. The snapof the strop against bruiser britches seem to linger in the night air. Mary Alice joined us. She’d made herself scarce once she’d seen Grandma grab up the shotgun. She was a little older now, a little wiser.
    Then back up the path came Mrs. Wilcox. You could see the shape of her hat bobbing against the dark. She’d been making a call at our privy on her way home.
    “Night now,” she called out, crossing the yard.
    “Night, Effie,” Grandma called back to her worst enemy.
    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.

A One-Woman Crime Wave

    1931
    A Great Depression had swept over the nation, and we couldn’t seem to throw it off. It was still Hoovering over us, as people said. It hadn’t bottomed out yet, but it was heading that way.
    You could see hard times from the window of the Wabash Blue Bird. The freight trains on the siding were loaded down with men trying to get from one part of the country to another, looking for work and something to eat. Mary Alice and I watched them as they stood in the open doors of the freight cars. They were walking along the right-of-way too, with nothing in their hands.
    Then when we got off the train at Grandma’s, a new sign on the platform read:
    DRIFTERS KEEP MOVING
    THIS MEANS YOU
    (SIGNED) O. B. DICKERSON, SHERIFF
    But at Grandma’s house it seemed to be business as usual. Mary Alice was still skittish about the old snaggletoothed tomcat in the cobhouse. Grandma said if he worried her that much, she ought to use the chamber pot in place of the privy. Chamber pots were under all the beds, and they were handy at night. But Mary Alice wouldn’t use hers during the day. She didn’t want to climb the stairs just for that. And she didn’t want to have to empty it any more than necessary.
    Being nine, Mary Alice decided to take charge. She carried a broom to the privy, to swat the cat if it gave her any trouble. She was soon back that first afternoon, dragging the broom. Her eyes were watering, and she was holding her nose. “Something died in the cobhouse,” she said.
    “Naw,” Grandma said. “It’s cheese.”
    “I don’t want any,” Mary Alice said.
    “It’s not for you,” Grandma said.
    Now that they mentioned it, I could smell something pretty powerful wafting into the kitchen. And I could see the old tomcat from here, stretched out in the