Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Dibble and Noah Webster by James Powell

© 1996 by James Powell

This month EQMM has the honor of publishing the 100th story penned by James Powell, a humorist who discovered long ago that the mystery story and the funny story have strong similarities. “Both,” he says, “travel down a strongly plotted road, all the while preparing the reader for the punch line.” Mr. Powell’s 100th work is a traditional suspense story laced with characteristic flights of fancy.

The McCurdy sisters were weeding the circular flowerbed behind their house, Maudie who was seventy-one in new white garden gloves decorated with little strawberries, Sal who was three years older in her worn goatskin leather ones. Both wore old jackets and trousers from their father’s wardrobe, Maudie with the cuffs turned up. They moved around the flowerbed slowly, sidling on their knees, Maudie clockwise, Sal counterclockwise, pulling the weeds and carefully cultivating the earth around the late daffodils and the emerging flowers.

As usual, Maudie was the first to stop for a break. She straightened up and arched her back. “Oh, my weary bones,” she said. Then she smiled and lightly touched the tops of the ferny little sprouts that looked as if they had only broken through the soil a moment before. “It’ll be a bumper year for larkspur,” she said.

Sal’s grunt combined her gruff agreement with the effort of straightening up.

“I saw old Helen Crowley on my walk yesterday,” Maudie continued. “And she said...” Here she smacked her lips. “ ‘...Well, I just don’t know who started that story about larkspur reseeding itself. Mine never comes back.’ ‘And it never will,’ I replied. ‘Not until you start weeding with your nose in the dirt. My father swore by it. And he was president of the bank.’ Well, that Mrs. Crowley gave me the fisheye like my mind’s starting to go.”

“Good,” said Sal. “There’s a woman with two wishing wells in her front yard. Two. And she thinks your mind is starting to go.” Sal snorted and shook her head. “Last week I asked her was the second wishing well a spare in case the first one didn’t work. She didn’t get it. She thinks I’m getting senile.”

“Good,” laughed Maudie.

They smiled at each other and at the secret they shared.

For years people could set their clocks by the McCurdy sisters, arm in arm, taking their daily constitutional through town. Until last fall, when suddenly they began taking their walks separately and at unpredictable times and in unpredictable directions, Sal alone with an old tam pulled down over her ears, Maudie alone in her flannel turtleneck.

If two people do the same thing at the same time long enough, they are bound to be thought odd. And if they suddenly stop doing it, they will be thought odder still. But after all, the town remembered, the McCurdy sisters were Halversons on their mother’s side and all the Halversons had their certifiable moments. On a shopping trip to Sarnia, for example, someone had once seen Mrs. McCurdy testing Spode china for the heft.

Sal and Maudie went back to work, weeding in silence now, enjoying the good memories the task brought back to them. As children they had gardened with Father while Mother read Dickens aloud to them, sitting in the shade nearby on a wicker armchair Father brought down from the porch for her. Later, when the McCurdy sisters were out of school and had jobs, Maudie at the library and Sal in the art department of a hardware chain with headquarters in Chatham, they always kept Saturday afternoons free for the garden. Even Mother’s Halverson temper had been charmed by those peaceful hours outside. Her dark rages always came behind closed doors, sudden bursts of words and objects directed at Father, who bore both stoically. In fact, his love for her was deep and abiding and when she died of a stroke three chapters into Our Mutual Friend, his drinking turned heavy and he let his affairs slide. The McCurdy sisters tended the garden themselves after that, while the wicker armchair sitting in the weather slowly unraveled into a crazy birdcage. On the day Father died, Maudie and Sal had carried the wicker wreckage down for the trashman.

For the next thirty years the McCurdy sisters lived alone in the big, decaying house, surrendering first one and then another room to leaking roofs, falling plaster, heaving floors, and the cost of heating oil, until all that was left for them was the kitchen, their parents’ old bedroom and bath above, and the connecting back staircase.

The McCurdy sisters weeded on. One of their Johnson neighbors started up the lawn mower. Maudie and Sal stared at the ground, pretending not to hear it. A year ago Maudie decided it would be a lark for them to do children’s books together, she the writing, Sal the illustrations. Sal agreed but insisted on something like The Magic Meat Grinder or The Brave Little Set of Socket Wrenches, for she was shy about venturing too far from the hardware things she knew how to draw.

Their most promising venture had been Lonny the Thoughtful Lawn Mower. Every week after his owner used him Lonny would sit in the musty toolshed and wonder why lawns had to be cut. Clearly his owner didn’t enjoy the job or take any real pleasure in the result. Wondering if there was some law of man or God requiring lawns to be cut, Lonny trundled down the alley to visit the prosperous machine in the lawyer’s toolshed, who told him there was no such law of man on the books. Next Lonny visited the grounds of the nearby church where a saintly old lawn mower everyone called “The Rev” assured him none of God’s commandments touched on lawns except perhaps about cutting them on Sunday.

But Lonny’s question inspired a midnight meeting of all the town lawn mowers. At the noisy gathering a big country-club rider-mower declared that when a faithfully mowed lawn died, it came back as part of the golf course, while good lawn mowers came back as big rider-mowers. Others maintained that men cut the grass because they’d do anything to get out of the house. (“Here, get this,” offered Sal when she read Maudie’s first draft, “Have a lawn mower call out, ‘I say people cut their lawns because they don’t want to be... uh... uh... automatic.’ And later on Lonny figures out the word the machine was really looking for was ‘shiftless.’ Get it?” “No, I most certainly do not,” said Maudie.)

The lawn mowers finally concluded that grass was cut because that was the way things were. “But that’s absurd,” Lonny insisted. “And if cutting grass is absurd, then we’re absurd.” A machine in the crowd called Lonny an existentialist. But the thoughtful little lawn mower persisted. “Okay, then try this on for size: Why does each house have to have its own lawn mower when four or five of us could do the whole town?” Suddenly he was being denounced on all sides as an atheistic communist and an advocate of socialized lawn care. A moment later Lonny was running away with a mob of angry lawn mowers in hot pursuit. He managed to escape down an alley and reached his toolshed, where he panted in the darkness while lawn mowers searched the night for him. Here the story stalled. Maudie claimed she couldn’t find the right ending.

Finally Sal came up with one of her own. Lonny wakes up one night to this noise like helicopters, with a strange light streaming through the cracks in the toolshed door. Outside he sees this giant lawn mower descending from heaven attended by choirs of weed-whackers and chipper-shredders. And a resonant voice from within the machine tells Lonny that because he was a lawn mower who dared to ask the question why, he would now be raised to another level of lawn mower consciousness. “Or some kind of glop like that,” added Sal.

Maudie shook her head. “But that wouldn’t be sincere. I mean, you really don’t believe there’s this Great Lawn Mower out there somewhere.”

“Hell no,” said Sal. “But you do.”

Maudie stood her ground. “I need an ending that gives meaning to Lonny’s life, one that’s an inspiration to young readers,” said Maudie.

Mulling it over in her heart Sal came to suspect Maudie just didn’t like the preliminary artwork. So, late one morning after they’d come in from tying up dahlias, Sal put the question to her sister directly. It was Maudie’s turn to make lunch. As she poured the can of soup into the saucepan she said, “I admit I hoped for something more cartoony, dear.” Looking under the pot to adjust the flame on the gas stove she added, “You know, machines with the corners knocked off. And eyes. And a mouth.”

Sal had been sitting at the kitchen table untangling a mare’s nest of green garden twine, the remains of a ball that had gotten away from them and rolled away down the yard almost to the garage. “You want whimsy,” she said scornfully. “Well, I hate whimsy. I say give the kids the real goods, a lawn mower that looks like a lawn mower, nuts and bolts and all.”

“Here’s a for-instance, dear,” offered Maudie. “Where Lonny’s panting there in the toolshed after his escape, how about drawing lines around his gas tank like, you know, heavy breathing?”

“Huh, I’m way ahead of you, sister,” said Sal, winding the untangled twine into a hank around her right hand. “I’ve rethought that whole bit. First off, it’s dark. So that page is black except for this balloon on a string of bubbles with the word ‘Whew!’ in it with drops of sweat like quotation marks around it.” She looked down at her winding. “So there’s your panting lawn mower, Miss Know-It-All McCurdy!”

“And how are you going to make Lonny thoughtful? A balloon with a light bulb in it?”

Sal scowled, hating Maudie’s superior tone. “Maybe,” she said cautiously, afraid she was walking into another of her sister’s treacherous little ambushes.

Maudie sprang her trap. “That’s only a thought, dear. Not thoughtfulness.”

Sal ground her teeth. “Don’t worry,” she said darkly. “I’ll think of something.”

As she turned to get the bowls from the cupboard Maudie gave her rendition of Mother’s delicately dancing, scornful laugh.

It was a sound that always made Sal boil. Red-faced, she got to her feet and stood behind her sister, snapping the twine between her fists.

“Now if you ask me,” continued Maudie, “I think you should try something more like The Little Engine That Could.

The Little Engine That Could, eh?” growled Sal. Suddenly she had looped the twine over Maudie’s head and crossed her forearms, pulling the twine tightly around her sister’s neck. “I think I can,” Sal muttered through clenched teeth as the bowls crashed to the floor. “I think I can. I damn well think I can.”

Sal ignored Maudie’s clawing hands and focused down at the top of her sister’s head, watching the skin beneath the thin white hair turn from pink to purple. Maudie’s hands were harmless fluttering creatures before Sal’s black rage passed and she let go the twine. Maudie fell to the linoleum, retching and making noises as if she had a fish bone caught in her throat.

Sal stood there blinking in astonishment for several minutes before she gathered her sister up and set her down in a kitchen chair. Then she dashed to the refrigerator and wrapped ice cubes in a tea towel. She had Maudie hold the compress to her throat to keep the swelling down while she pounded upstairs for the salve to put on the broken skin. She was crying when she came back down with it. Maudie was crying, too. Sal told her many times how sorry she was. And Maudie nodded to show she understood.

It was several days before Maudie could speak above a croak, and several weeks before Sal could look at that mark around her sister’s neck without having to turn away with tears in her eyes. They sat together for many hours holding hands and telling each other that everything was going to be all right. They never spoke of Lonny the Thoughtful Lawn Mower or the subject of children’s books again.

It wasn’t until early fall that the McCurdy sisters got back into their usual routine. One evening Sal was up in the bedroom with her drawing board, working on one of her inventions, when Maudie, who had been ironing down in the kitchen, came up and started searching for something in Father’s chest of drawers. Sal paid her no attention until Maudie asked, “Have you seen the dibble?”

“What the hell’s a dibble?” she demanded.

“The pointy wooden thing with a ball for a handle, for making holes for planting bulbs.”

“You mean the bulb planter,” said Sal. “You always have to call a spade a shovel.” She made her thumb and forefinger into a monocle and, looking at her sister through it, said, “ ‘I say, have you seen the dibble, old thing?’ No, I haven’t. And I don’t think you’re going to find it in Father’s bureau.”

Maudie gave a patient little laugh. “No, I’m looking for his housewife, that khaki roll-up thing they gave him in the army for buttons and needle and thread. I recall he had a needle threader. My eyes won’t do the trick anymore. Anyway, the looking made me remember looking for the dibble yesterday and not finding it.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” said Sal. “I haven’t seen it since we planted those bulbs last week.” Then she added, “You’re back reading that damn dictionary again.”

Maudie moved her search to another drawer. “I may read what I choose,” she said coolly. “And if I choose to add to my vocabulary, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”

“Giving something a fancy name doesn’t change anything.”

“Mr. Noah Webster’s dictionary is a rare goblet where all may come to sip the adamantine water of orthography.”

“I guess that means spelling, right?” demanded Sal. “So how do you look up a word to see if you’re spelling it right if you don’t know how to spell it?”

“Mr. Webster was a great scholar,” insisted Maudie. “Imagine collecting all the words there were and putting them together without missing a single one.”

“Yeah?” said Sal. “Remember what Father told us about collateral for a loan. There were the tangibles, the things you could touch. Then there was the talk, the words. Blue sky, he called it.”

“The dictionary is the bright palette we use to paint our hopes and dreams,” said Maudie, closing the drawer and moving on to the next.

“Blather,” said Sal. “Blather doesn’t change anything about the here-and-now. And the hereafter is blue sky. Father would have called Noah Webster a blather monger, a piffle merchant. And Mother, why she never used a word in an argument if there was a piece of china handy.”

“Not just china, dear,” Maudie corrected her. “Mother threw Spode. A name. A word.” (In her fights with Father, Mother would have considered it beneath her Halverson blood to throw anything less than Spode or Minton, as if daring Father to tell her not to so she could call him a low, bean-counting bastard.)

“Father would have considered Mr. Webster a Renaissance man,” continued Maudie. “In addition to giving us the dictionary, he gained fame as a lawyer and a statesman. He served his country in the Senate and in Presidential cabinets.”

Sal looked at her with narrowing eyes. “Hold on a sec.”

But Maudie wouldn’t be interrupted. As she pulled out the bottom drawer she said, “In fact, back in his home state Mr. Webster’s skills as a lawyer were so respected that legend had it he once defended a man who’d sold his soul to the Devil, and Mr. Webster beat the Devil himself in legal argument.” Maudie looked up, baffled by the sputtering sounds of her sister pretending to suppress laughter. It was a moment before she realized she had confused Noah Webster with Daniel. Her cheeks burned with shame and her ears turned red.

Sal’s body shook with laughter. She pointed at her sister’s face and, laughing, said, “Oh, that’s rich. That’s rich.”

Maudie began to shake with anger. She would not be mocked! She would not be humiliated!

“Oh, Father would have loved that one,” said Sal, turning away and covering her nose and mouth in a tent of fingers.

Maudie’s anger became fury. “No, he would not!” she shouted. “Shut up! Shut up!” Here her trembling fingers found the scar on her throat. Her eyes grew large with wild discovery and she whispered, “You think you can wring my neck like I’m a chicken.” Her hand dropped from the scar to her father’s service revolver, which lay in the corner of the bottom drawer as if he’d placed it there for her for just this moment. Snatching it up, Maudie pointed the heavy thing at the back of her sister’s head, averted her eyes, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet creased Sal’s skull. They couldn’t get the doctor. Old Dr. Lohman, who’d had a crush on their mother, might have turned a blind eye. But the new young doctor would’ve had to report the bullet wound to the police. Sal was in bed for a week with a terrible headache. Maudie nursed her night and day. The wound healed, but it left an ugly scar.

When Sal was up and around again she and Maudie sat talking earnestly together for hours on end. There were no pats or tears or handholding now, only facts to be faced. They both knew that something had to be done.

Maudie and Sal crept toward each other in the circular flowerbed, their weeding almost done. After a while Maudie looked over at her sister as if about to ask something of a delicate nature. “Do ‘granny fannies’ count?” she whispered, looking back over her shoulder to see if she was being watched from behind. Last fall they’d had their hedge trimmed for the first time since their father died. But it still stood high enough to give them privacy on all four sides.

“I’d allow that,” said Sal. After all, Maudie had allowed her the pink plastic flamingo. On their separate walks the McCurdy sisters competed to see who could spot the most lawn decorations. The granny fanny, the painted pine cutout of the rear end of a fat woman leaning over, working in a flowerbed, had been appearing in front yards on the way to Chatham. But Maudie’s sighting was the first within the town limits.

“Then that makes my count thirty-nine,” said Maudie. “Five geese, nine goslings, four sheep, six lambs, three pheasant (two cocks and a hen bird), four mallard whirligigs and one Woody Woodpecker ditto, three cows (two Holsteins and a Jersey), and five cement gnomes, three freestanding and one each fishing in Mrs. Crowley’s wishing wells.” She laughed. “So I’m one ahead. And I suspect tomorrow I’ll find your plastic flamingo.” Pleased with herself, Maudie went back to work.

“We’ll see about that,” said Sal.

When they were almost side by side Maudie exclaimed, “Well, look at this, will you? Here’s where it’s been all the time.” She reached into the central clump of Thalia daffodils and pulled out the sharp spike of polished wood with a ball for a handle. “It’s the...” She caught herself. “It’s the bulb planter,” she said.

Sal understood. “No, honey,” she started to insist. “It’s the dib... It’s the dib...” But when she couldn’t get her tongue around the silly word she started snorting with laughter. After a struggle she seemed to get control of herself. With her face a wobbly deadpan, she tried again. “Dib... dib...” Finally she had to give in to the laughter. Waving her hands apologetically, she roared until the tears came to her eyes.

Maudie watched, at first quizzical, as though she couldn’t understand what her sister was laughing at. “Please stop, dear,” she said gravely. But Sal couldn’t help laughing. The blood rose in Maudie’s face as she remembered the humiliation of her Webster mix-up. “Stop, dear,” she warned. But Sal laughed on. It seemed to Maudie that she heard her father’s voice join in the laughter.

“Dib... dib... dib...” said Sal breathlessly and doubled over with mirth.

Maudie’s face was as purple as her sister’s now. She raised both hands over her head and struck. “Dibble!” she shouted as if the word itself was sharp enough to kill. “Dibble! Dibble! Dibble!” And each time she spoke the word she drove the wooden spike into Sal’s back. She was crying before she stopped. For a long time she knelt there, looking over at the body of her dead sister.

At last Maudie wiped her face on her sleeve and got up. Stuffing the dibble into her jacket pocket she grabbed Sal’s body under the arms and slowly and laboriously dragged it down the yard toward the garage, stopping several times along the way to catch her breath.

The compost heap down by the garage was new. They had started it last fall with the hedge clippings. This March they’d added the mulch of leaves they’d raked from the flowerbeds and the garden rubbish, carrying it down in bushelbaskets, Maudie’s mittened hand in one wire handle and Sal’s long red fingers in the other. On the ground beside the compost heap lay a weathered old six-paneled door of the kind once called “cross-and-open-Bible.” Maudie set the body down alongside it. She lifted the door to uncover the six-by-three-foot hole she and her sister had dug there last October before the ground froze. Maudie manhandled the body over to the edge, eased the legs in at one end, and as best she could, she lowered the rest of the body so that her sister’s corpse lay on its back. Taking off her jacket, she knelt down on the lip of the grave and spread it across the body like a coverlet, tucking the collar up under Sal’s gray chin.

Maudie remained there on her knees for a moment. Sal had always insisted no prayer be said over her body. Still, a prayer did seem in order, so Maudie offered up one for her own soul. Then she took off her bloody gardening gloves, tossed them into the grave, and got to her feet. She went into the garage and, one at a time she lugged out the black plastic bags half filled with dirt. When she’d emptied their contents back into the hole she got the pitchfork and moved the compost heap to cover the fresh dirt. Then she carried the old door back inside the garage where they’d found it.

Maudie walked up to the house and called the police. “Dear,” she told the woman who took her call, “this is Miss Maude McCurdy at Fifteen Pine Street.” Then she repeated the speech she and her sister had worked out together for the survivor to use. “I’m very worried. It’s about my sister. You see, she went out for her walk two hours ago and she isn’t back yet. She gets forgetful sometimes, and I’m afraid she might have wandered off into the woods.”

Maudie hung up the phone and went over to the kitchen table. In the drawer there were two photographs, one of herself, the other of her sister. She took out Sal’s picture, set it down on the table, and closed the drawer. They knew the police would want a recent photograph. She remembered the time they’d spent last October going through the photo box and smiling at each other and their shared secret as they made their choices. Who would she have to smile at and share a secret with now?

The roof of Maudie’s mouth ached. But she fought back the tears. There were still things to do. She had to go upstairs and wash and change her clothes. There would be plenty of time for crying after the police had come and gone.