A Year Down Yonder

In the small town of the novel’s setting, the culinary arts are the only form of artistry that garners much interest or respect. Good cooking and baking enjoy the cache and confer a certain status and power. Grandma Dowdel’s renowned cherry tarts, for instance, have made her a local heavyweight, such that the town’s self-described “aristocrat,” Wilhelmina Weidenbach, goes to extraordinary lengths to retain her baking services for a prestigious DAR function. Though she has been excluded from Wilhelmina’s pure-blooded social clique, Grandma’s prodigious baking skills now put them in the palm of her hand, a position she uses to take them down a notch or two.

Similarly, the town’s holiday parties would be gastronomic debacles if not for Grandma’s famous pies, which she conjures up over long nights in the kitchen with meticulous praxis and songs (“As much punkin as cream, / Burnt sugar in a stream” [34]), like a sorceress casting powerful spells. At first, Mary Alice gapes at her grandmother’s casual misdeeds, such as stealing pumpkins and ramming her neighbor’s pecan tree with his own tractor. At the Halloween party, however, she sees how Grandma gets away with so much: Even the lady whose pumpkins she has stolen swoons over her delicious pies and never mentions the theft. If, as the adage goes, the way to one’s heart is through their stomach, Grandma has won the love and esteem of her isolated, food-loving community, despite the surface prickliness that has also made her feared. In addition, she enlists Mary Alice to help her with her community baking, passing on her recipes and knowledge in an illustration of The Power of Intergenerational Relationships.

On her very first day in town, Mary Alice learns the efficacy of a well-orchestrated prank when her grandmother lures Mildred Burdick into her house and then leaves her stranded, five miles from home, with no horse and no shoes. Brains and subtlety, she shows her granddaughter, can easily prevail over brute force. Her lesson is amplified around Halloween, which has a much different flavor in this rural town than in Chicago: The whole month of October becomes a time of skullduggery and nocturnal pranks, ranging from the diabolically clever to the mindlessly destructive. Roving packs of boys break windows, dangle buggies from steeples, and demolish outhouses, but Grandma beats them at their own game, stringing tripwires around her privy and cooking up glue to dump on the vandals’ heads. Nor does the mischief end on Halloween: Grandma, who never suffers fools gladly, is always ready with a mischievous prank, year-round. On Washington’s birthday, she sabotages a DAR tea party by inviting a woman who knows a scandalous secret about the snobbish hostess. In addition, when Maxine Patch, posing nude for a portrait, is menaced by a large snake, Grandma summons the whole town by shooting off her shotgun.

Grandma’s pranks, unlike the boys’ Halloween shenanigans, are rooted less in boredom or mean-spiritedness than in what Mary Alice calls “justice.” Each one, however disruptive, arguably does some good for the community, whether by punishing bullies and snobs or by saving her naïve lodger from the romantic machinations of an unworthy pursuer. On Valentine’s Day, Mary Alice follows her grandmother’s salutary example with her prank, forging a handful of valentines for the timid Ina-Rae Gage to deflate the preening “queen bee” Carleen Lovejoy.