Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(An adventure in the past, with Letty, Stephen and their childhood friends, during the 1930s. I may continue writing about Luna City in the past, when I finish the 12th chronicle. It’s a place very dear to me, but several present-day story arcs are coming to a natural conclusion.)

From – The Secret Life of Brownies

Letty McAllister was just eleven years old and her older brother Douglas was thirteen, in summer of the year that the brownies appeared in Luna City; 1932. That was the third year of the great Depression, although Letty and Douglas and their friend, Stephen Wyler were barely aware of that. Something to do with a stock market crashing Letty gathered from overhearing adults talk it over, with somber faces and worried voices.

“I think it means the Fat Stock Show,” Stephen Wyler assured them, late in 1929 when Letty and Douglas consulted with their friend. He was the son of a rancher, and fairly familiar with matters to do with cattle and other beasts of the Wyler Ranch.

“Are you certain?” Douglas asked, not entirely convinced. The adults seemed to have been most particularly worried. “I don’t believe there are cattle in New York City.”

“Perhaps it was some other kind of stock,” Stephen conceded.

As it turned out, the depression had nothing at all to do with the San Antonio Fat Stock Show. What it meant to Luna City was that lean times came in, hung up coat and hat and decided to sit for a long spell. It meant that local small ranchers and farmers went bust, losing home and properties to foreclosure by the bank, and then a cascade of failing banks and small businesses shutting up for good.  All that, and for Luna City it also meant an increase of bums and hobos drifting through, looking for work or just a free meal. Since no one had any money to spare to hire farm hands, the hoboes mostly drifted on, although there were some who were agreeable to doing chores by the day in exchange for a few meals and a place under a roof to sleep.

The McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler, together with a handful of friends from school, had built themselves a clubhouse with odd planks and tree branches brought down by winter floods. They settled on a sheltered declivity in the riverbank not far from the burnt-out ruins of an old mansion on a hill commanding a view of the river, and the washhouse and bathrooms for a tourist camp which had never really gotten off the ground. The owners of the derelict tourist camp had long given up on the property, even before the stock market crash, and left the cabins and the paved space to molder away, baked in the harsh Texas summer sunshine, and blasted by winter winds, perhaps proving that even in good times, the tourist camp wouldn’t have made a go of it. Nothing had lived anywhere near the owl-haunted ruins of the old mansion for decades, although there was a shed, leaning perilously to one side, and an icehouse with thick and insulated walls built into a sloping hillside not far from a pile of burnt timbers and brick, tangled over with mats of wild morning glory vines. Stephen, Douglas, their tag-along acolyte Artie Vaughn, and Letty’s friend, Retta Livingston sometimes dared aspirants to membership in their private club to brave the spiders and other critters who inhabited the ruins of the roofless bathhouse and the icehouse as a condition of membership. The old icehouse was a dank cave, hidden among the brush; so far, no one had accepted the dare.

It was Retta, who lived with her family on a small farm on the outskirts of Luna City, who first mentioned the brownies. Retta and Letty were in the same Girl Scout troop, a troop led by Mrs. Rowbottom, who was the wife of the Reverent Calvin Rowbottom, the minister of the Methodist church in Luna City.

“Mrs. Allison says that she is being visited at night by helpful brownies,” Retta commented one afternoon, when they had gathered at the clubhouse to share out a little bag of penny candy that Stephen Wyler had brought with his allowance money. “Like the story that Mrs. Rowbottom told us about brownies coming in at night to do chores for people who leave them a bowl of milk or something.”

“Who’s Mrs. Allison, when she’s at home?” Stephen asked, flippantly. “And how can she tell?”

Retta regarded Stephen with an impatient expression. “Mrs. Allison lives across the small pasture from us – on the edge of town. Her husband finally got a job helping to build that big ol’ Hoover dam in Arizona and such. They have a little boy – Samuel, but he caught polio this summer and it took him really bad. The doctors said to keep him in in the hospital in Karnesville, he was that bad sick. He even got put in that iron lung machine for a week! They were afraid that he might die of the polio, or be paralyzed for life. Mrs. Allison, she tries to keep real cheerful about his condition, but she told my ma that he might never be able to walk again. Mrs. Allison, she goes to Karnesville purt’ near every day on the bus, so that she can see to Samuel in the hospital. He’s only six years old – the same age as my little brother.”

“What about the brownie visiting?” Letty was fascinated. The bus to Karnesville came by the McAllister house, and the Tip-Top Ice House and Gas around nine o’clock on weekday mornings, ten on Saturdays. (The bus didn’t run on Sundays.)

“It was right curious,” Retta answered. “Mrs. Allison went to Town Square to wait for the bus to come … as she didn’t want to miss it. It stops by Dunsmore’s grocery …”

“Only it isn’t Dunsmore’s grocery anymore,” Artie Vaughn added, rather unnecessarily.

“We know that!” Letty pointed out, “It’s just that the man who owns the grocery store ever since Mr. Dunsmore went to prison and had to sell up never has anyone working there who stays long enough for anyone to remember their names. They don’t stay in Luna City long enough to matter.”

“Well, anyway, there was a lot of people standing around, and Mrs. Allison said that she came away in such a rush that she had forgotten to let the chickens out, and to stack up the cord of firewood that was delivered. She talked about that and so much else … but when she came home after dark that evening … she saw that all the wood had been stacked ever so neatly, the chickens had been let out – and then put away again. There was a little note, left where the milkman had delivered two quarts of milk to the ice-box. One of the bottles was gone, but the note said ‘We took the milk, we needed it for the baby’ and just a little scrawled ‘B’ for a signature.”

“No one ever locks their doors around here,” Stephen remarked. “It could have been anyone, walking in.” He looked around at the ring of faces. They were gathered in the Club – a little ramshackle tipi of branches and odd planks brought down by previous winter’s floods leaned up against a mostly-dead cottonwood tree. Stephen, the McAllisters and their other friends had built it for a secret clubhouse, in an out-of-the-way bend in the river, below Luna City. “Maybe Mrs. Allison out to start locking her doors when she goes to spend all day, every day at the hospital. There are a lot of scurvy rogues on the tramp, you know. Just to be on the safe side.” Stephen had picked up the phrase “scurvy rogues” from an adventure book about pirates on the Spanish Main and used it at every opportunity.

“Well, she does at night,” Retta allowed. “Being that she is all alone in the house, and her husband is away…”

“She ought to have a dog,” Artie Vaughn said. “Dogs are the best guardian. Like Rin-Tin-Tin…”

“Yes, but a dog would chase her chickens, less’n she kept an eye on it,” Retta replied. “And anyway … maybe a dog would chase away the brownies. And then they wouldn’t ever come back.”

“Did they?” Letty was fascinated – it all seemed as if a fairy story was coming to life – and in Luna City! “Come back again to Mrs. Allison?”

“They did!” Retta replied, triumphantly. “She thought at first that one of her neighbors was playing a little game with her, so she left a note on the stoop under the empty milk bottles. She thanked the Brownies for stacking the wood and looking after the chickens, and asked if  they would dust the parlor and hanging out the wet washing for her, as she wouldn’t have time to do it in the morning before she went to Karnesville … and when she came home, the laundry was all dry and folded up neatly, and the parlor was as clean as a whistle!”

“Was it a neighbor, funning with her?” Artie was deeply impressed.

“She doesn’t think so,” Retta answered. “And she says now that she wouldn’t do anything to frighten them or chase them away. The Brownies have been such a help when she is so worried about little Sammy, it doesn’t matter to her who they are or where they came from. She leaves a note for them about the chores that need doing while she is away, and a bottle of milk, every morning. She also leaves them bread, cookies, and other things to eat. And every evening when she comes home, the chores are done, and the milk and food she left for the Brownies is gone.”

“That sounds like a miracle,” Letty ventured, and Retta nodded.

“It’s someone doing a good deed, without wanting any credit for it,” Douglas agreed. He was older than the other children by two years, thoughtful and intelligent. He was their natural leader, because he could see and understand aspects and matters of the larger world, matters that the others frequently found baffling. “But look, guys… (and Douglas used that generic denominator to the Club, although two of them were girls.) … do your brownies in the stories have babies among them? They said in that first note – they needed milk for a baby.”

Letty shook her head. “Mrs. Rowbottom never said anything about baby brownies.”

“I don’t think they do have babies,” Letty replied, after a long pause. “They are just sort of helpful spirits.”

“Look, guys,” Douglas continued. “I can believe in being helpful. Neigborly. I can believe that someone is helping Mrs. Allison, but I don’t believe in helpful spirits – brownies, elves, Santa Claus or any other fancy. That’s not logical in the real world.”