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Ruth Ann’s printing, though she’d had help with the spelling.
    CORN RELISH
1958
    It was getting harder to keep Ruth Ann home. Mother about gave up trying.
    A jar of corn relish rolled all the way over onto our porch. The tarp I’d once worn was stretched on Mrs. Dowdel’s side yard, thick with drying black walnuts. The stove lengths began to rise in piles on her back porch. She could see winter from here.
    I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t see a day ahead. Typical of me, the next time trouble broke out next door, I was sound asleep.
     

The Fall of the Year

C HAPTER S IX

The Haunted Melon Patch
    E vidently Mrs. Dowdel always had extra trouble in the fall of the year. Nameless figures were known to sneak down behind the houses to her patch and swipe her melons. It was kind of a local tradition. Dating couples had been flushed out of this same location.
    The town knew Mrs. Dowdel was armed and dangerous. But high school kids would figure that trying to steal a half-ripe watermelon was worth the risk of getting your head blown off.
    Even after her long days, Mrs. Dowdel sat guard down there. You could see her on sentry duty from our back porch. She made herself pretty comfortable. There was a nip in the air now, but she’d put together a little stove from cinder-blocks and an oven rack. A pot of camp coffee brewed onthe grille. She buried baking potatoes under the fire. There she hunkered on two overturned pails in a cap with flaps and three or four afghans. Her melons and squash were coming on. Behind her on the vines climbing the cobhouse, her gourds were ready.
    So was she. The Winchester was always across her big knees, unless she was cleaning it by firelight.
    Maybe sitting out in the hazy night, watching the sparks rise to join the stars, gave Mrs. Dowdel ideas. Maybe she even saw weird visions in the firelight’s flicker. Who knows?
    A rumor about that particular melon patch began to drift through town. At first it wasn’t louder than the whisper of dry leaves. A word here. A word there. It could have come from anywhere. Then it broke into print in the county seat newspaper. A column called “News From Our Outlying Communities” appeared in the
Piatt County Call:
    STRANGE SIGHTINGS
IN RURAL VICINITY
    According to Mrs. Dowdel, a lifelong resident, there is no truth to the story making the rounds of one of our smaller villages. In a melon patch at the rear of the Dowdel property, rumor reports that an Unexplained Presence has been sighted by various intruders in the dark of night. Young couples have fled the patch in terror, leaving behind half-empty bottles of Thunderbird wine,picnic blankets, and several transistor radios.
    “Horsefeathers,” Mrs. Dowdel is quoted as saying, or a very similar word. “I ain’t seen a thing out of the ordinary, and I’m in my patch very nearly every night to discourage the juvenile delinquents who is taking over the town.”
    However, the elderly landowner admitted that her property and outbuildings are built over an ancient Kickapoo burial ground.
    “Oh pshaw,” Mrs. Dowdel expostulated. “As kids we was forever digging up arrowheads and calabashes and all them ancient relics. Beadwork and such stuff. Once in a great while a skull would surface, or a dog would dig up something.”
    And the Unexplained Presence?
    “Some used to say they’d seen the ghost of a girl in a feathered headdress and moccasins,” Mrs. Dowdel recalled. “You know how people talk. They called her the Kickapoo Princess.”
    When our reporter inquired if she’d ever seen the ghostly Kickapoo Princess herself, the aged matron replied, “Me? I got enough aggravation from the living without messing with the dead.”
    Asked for a final word on the subject, Mrs. Dowdel said, “Keep off my property. You know who you are. The next ghost you see could be you.”
    After this news broke, the rumor of spooky doings in the melon patch spread far out into the county.
    A steady line of cars and trucks