Grandma lifted the lid on one side of the stove with a poker and filled the opening with kindling from the wood box. Our oven door hadn’t closed right for some time, so she grabbed a piece of kindling to prop it up. Busy mixing up a pan of cornbread, she turned her back on the open door just long enough for Buttermilk to crawl inside the cavernous space, still warm from the earlier baking. Without noticing, Grandma slid the pan of cornbread in, propped the door closed, and lit a match to the wood in the other side. The fire caught and began to heat up the oven.
Before long a caterwauling started up that would have blinkied sweet milk.
Grandma kicked the prop to one side and the oven door slammed onto the linoleum with a bang that rattled the dishes. Cornbread batter up to his knees, Buttermilk leaped out and streaked up the stairs, yowling as he went.
In the middle of the ruckus, the doorbell rang.
Aunt Lila opened the door to a tall, blond man with a big friendly smile. Romeo Three had arrived.
“Welcome to West Virginia,” she said. “Come on in and make yourself at home. I gotta look for a half-cooked cat.”
He said he preferred his cat well done.
Aunt Lila looked up at him and busted out laughing.
We searched attic to cellar, following splats of batter upstairs and down, Charles Landwehr trailing along after Aunt Lila. Eventually we found Buttermilk under the bathtub, busy licking cornbread batter off his belly. Charles Landwehr reached back and scooped him out. Other than the long oval he’d scorched bald on one side, he didn’t appear to have any damage. Mother said she didn’t know how many lives that cat had left, but he’d sure as heck just used up one of them.
Grandma said she’d just as soon Mother didn’t use words like heck. Mother rolled her eyes and headed to the kitchen to start a new batch of cornbread.
While Charles Landwehr and Aunt Lila cleaned up the batter Buttermilk had tracked through the house, Grandma went to fetch a jar of piccalilli from the fruit house, a cinderblock building that housed our stores of canned fruits and vegetables. Piccalilli is a golden relish of vegetables and fruit that goes just right with ham and most anything else you think to put it on.
Grandma didn’t get far before she rushed back in, hollering for Grandpa.
“Come quick, Clev! He’s got the butcher knife!”
Old man Dunkley, all crippled up with lumbago, was hobbling along in his yard trying to catch Granny Dunkley. They were our next-door neighbors. She hopped onto the cinderblock Grandpa had put next to her side of our fence, hitched her dress up and threw her leg over, barely able to reach the block on our side without impaling herself on the picket fence.
The old man hadn’t managed to catch up yet.
Grandpa came out of our house holding a pop bottle of vinegar water left over from cleaning the windows. “Now Zeb, you put that knife down and go on back to the house.” His voice was calm.
Old man Dunkley either couldn’t hear him or didn’t want to.
The closer he got, the bigger that butcher knife looked.
“Zeb Dunkley, you stop or I’ll be obliged to douse you with this poison,” Grandpa said, a little louder this time. “Kill you deader than a rattlesnake. You’d be wise to quile yourself down.”
The old man kept coming.
All of a sudden, Charles Landwehr leaped over the fence and grabbed the knife before the old man even realized what had happened. Disarmed and out of breath, the old man quieted right down. Charles Landwehr handed the knife to Granny Dunkley.
“I’ve a mind to poke a hole in that old man and let the meanness spill out of him,” she said, “but I don’t want it turning my grass yellow.”
There was a mole on her chin I’d never paid any attention to, a great big one. She had tied a coarse black thread around it and finished it off with a bow, the ends of which hung down and waved back and forth when she talked. It was awful hard not to stare. About then Grandma came out with two plates of food she held on to until Charles Landwehr helped Granny Dunkley climb back over the fence.
“Come on, old man, let’s go to the house and thank the good Lord for providing this fine supper,” she said, starting down the path with the plates. “After you eat your fill, I’ll read to you from the Good Book. Maybe some of it will sink in.”
“Yes’m,” he said, just meek as a mouse.
He tucked along behind her, following the tantalizing smells in her wake.
It was a peace that he would disturb again, but hopefully not that night.
After we ate supper, Mother went with Vonnie and me to check on the Dunkleys, taking strawberry shortcake as our excuse to visit. The old man was sitting in his favorite rocker smoking a pipe. Granny Dunkley sat opposite him on a mohair settee. She was smoking too, a homemade corncob pipe with a reed of some kind for the stem. They each smoked a pipe of applewood tobacco every evening after supper. The earthy sweetness that hung in the air lingered on me long after I went home.
Old man Dunkley’s ponytailed hair and handlebar mustache made him look for all the world like Wild Bill Hickok, but it was Buffalo Bill he talked about all the time. He told tales of working in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, traveling around Colorado, and then going with the show to New York. He was old now, senile, my grandma said, and sometimes didn’t know what he was talking about.
I believed every word he said.
“Be quiet, old man, these young’uns have heard enough of your yarns,” Granny Dunkley said, going off to bring us a piece of the hard candy she kept in the icebox, one of several still in
