A Long Way From Chicago by Richard Peck

lead, we carried everything out into the night, making many trips. We lugged it all across the road and up to the Wabash Railroad right-of-way and planted the card table in the gravel.
    Finally, the platters of fish and potatoes overlapped on the table, and the opened beer bottles stood in a row beside the tracks.
    As the drifters came along, being hounded out of town,Grandma gave them a good feed and a beer to wet their whistles. Mary Alice helped, in an apron of Grandma’s that dragged the ground. They were hollow-eyed men who couldn’t believe their luck. Two or three of them, then five or six. Then a bunch, standing around the table, eating with both hands, sharing out the beer. They didn’t say much. They didn’t thank her. She wasn’t looking for thanks.
    She’d taken off her overalls and put the same wash dress back on, but she’d tied a fresh apron over it. Her hair was a mess, fanning out from the bun at the back, white in the moonlight. She watched them feed, working her mouth.
    Then we saw the swinging lanterns, the sheriff and his deputies coming along behind to keep the drifters moving.
    Up trooped O. B. Dickerson, dressed now with his badge on and his belt full of bullets riding low under his belly. His deputies loomed behind him, but they weren’t singing “Sweet Adeline.”
    “Okay, okay, break it up,” he said, elbowing through the drifters. Then he came to Grandma.
    “Dagnab it, Mrs. Dowdel, you’re everywhere I turn. You’re all over me like white on rice.
Now
what do you think you’re doing?”
    “I’m giving these boys the first eats they’ve had today.”
    “Or yesterday,” a drifter said.
    “Mrs. Dowdel, let me ’splain something to you,” the sheriff bawled. “We don’t want to feed these loafers. We want ’em out of town.”
    “They’re out of town.” Grandma pointed her spatula atthe sheriff’s feet. “The town stops there. We’re in the county.”
    “Yes, and I’m the sheriff of the county!” O. B. Dickerson bellowed. “You’re in my jurisdiction!”
    “Do tell,” Grandma said. “Run me in.”
    The minute she said that, all the drifters looked up. That was when Sheriff Dickerson’s deputies saw they were outnumbered.
    “Mrs. Dowdel,” the sheriff boomed, “I wouldn’t know what to charge you with first. You’re a one-woman crime wave. Where’d you get them fish, for instance?” he said, wisely overlooking the home brews in the drifters’ hands.
    “Out of a trap in Salt Crick,” Grandma remarked. “Same as you get yours.”
    O. B. Dickerson’s eyes bulged. “You accusing me, the sheriff of Piatt County, of running fish traps?” He poked his own chest with a pudgy finger.
    “Not this morning,” Grandma replied. “You was too drunk.”
    The drifters chuckled.
    “And talkin’ about this morning,” the sheriff said, his face shading purple even in the darkness, “you stole my boat. That’s what we call larceny, Mrs. Dowdel. You could go up for that.”
    “Oh well, the boat.” Grandma made a little gesture with the spatula. “You’ll find it tied up at Aunt Puss Chapman’s dock. As a rule, I take it back where you tie it up. But of course I couldn’t do that this morning. How could I row these grandkids of mine back past the Rod and Gun Club? They’d already seen what nochild should—the sheriff and his deputies, blind drunk and naked as jaybirds, dancin’ jigs on the porch and I don’t know what all. It’s like to have marked this girl for life.”
    Grandma nudged Mary Alice, who stood there in the big apron looking drooped and damaged.
    “I’m thinkin’ about taking her to the doctor so she can talk it out. I don’t want her to develop one of them complexes you hear about.”
    “Whoa,” the deputies murmured behind Sheriff Dickerson.
    Earl T. Askew stepped up and said into his ear, “O.B., let’s just let sleeping dogs lay. I got my hands full with Mrs. Askew as it is.”
    The sheriff simmered, but said, “Okay, Earl, if