A Long Way From Chicago Read Free Page B

was meant to be an annual event.
    Mary Alice pitched a fit. It meant another week of summer vacation away from her friends, Beverly and Audrey. Besides, she said she wasn’t over last year’s visit yet. One night she’d have a nightmare about old Shotgun Cheatham sitting up in his coffin, and on the night after that she’d dream that Grandma’s big old tomcat was jumping at her. Or so she said.
    But having no choice, we went. If any of us had grown over the year, it was Grandma herself. And she still seemed to prize her privacy as much as ever. She mostly stayed home because she said the whole town was a slumand she didn’t give two hoots about it. And she wouldn’t even have a radio in her house.
    Mary Alice brought her jump rope to keep herself occupied, though she said jumping rope by yourself was the loneliest job in the world. I took a giant jigsaw puzzle to put together. It was supposed to depict Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and his airplane, the
Spirit of St. Louis.
There wasn’t room for it in our Chicago apartment. But in the summers Grandma took down the stove that heated her front room, so there was space to leave a card table up.
    One night soon after we arrived, I was working on the puzzle and Grandma was drowsing in her platform rocker. She said she never slept, but she had to wake herself up to go to bed. Earlier, before it got dark, Mary Alice had been jumping rope outside. There weren’t a lot of sidewalks in Grandma’s town, but a strip of concrete ran from her front door out to the countrified mailbox beside the road. Grandma and I had been listening to Mary Alice:
    Jump said Coolidge,
    Jump said Hoover,
    Jump said the driver of the furniture mover.
    And Mary Alice’s personal favorite:
    I had a letter from Nellie,
    And what do you think it said?
    Nellie had a baby,
    And its hair was red.
    Now how many hairs were on that head?
    One, two, three . . .
    When she got up to 180, Grandma called her inside.
    So now Mary Alice was sulking somewhere. Grandma’s breathing was steady, the way it got before she started snoring. Then I heard a horse clopping past.
    That was no rare thing around here. But I noticed the silence when the horse stopped outside. Then right away heels kicked its sides, and the horse galloped off. It was a sound right out of a Tom Mix movie. I was reaching for a puzzle part that was just blue sky when a flash of light filled the bay window. Then an explosion shook the house and made my puzzle jump. It wasn’t as loud as the time Grandma squeezed off two rounds right here in the front room. But it brought her out of her chair.
    Like a ship under sail, she made for the front door. Mary Alice appeared from somewhere, and we both looked around Grandma into the night. You could barely see a stump out by the road. It was the post that had held the mailbox. But the mailbox was gone—in several directions. We heard a piece of metal slide down the shingles of the roof, bounce off the gutter, and fall through the snowball bushes.
    Somebody on horseback had blown Grandma’s mailbox sky high. The Fourth of July was over, but there were still plenty of loose fireworks around. And this was no small charge, not a baby-waker or even a torpedo. This could have been the work of a cherry bomb.
    Grandma planted her big fists on her big hips, and her jaw clenched in a familiar way.
    “Cowgills,” she said, like that explained it.
    Grandma slept in a room downstairs to save herself the stairs. Mary Alice and I had rooms upstairs. They were sparely furnished, with iron bedsteads and a lot of dead bugs on the sills. After I got used to how quiet the country was at night, I slept good up there. But I lay awake that night, recalling the sound when Grandma’s mailbox was blown to smithereens. I was ten, the age when things blowing up interested me, but I wondered who’d dare do this to Grandma.
    My eyelids drooped, and it was morning. The smell of breakfast wafted up from the kitchen. You had to be