A Fourth Meal of Mayhem Read online

  “Now,” continued Strutter, “would be a good time to double my life insurance if I had any.”

  “As a law officer, I’m here to prevent all crimes, especially murder. All of this is covered under Criminal Code Statute 4213-9209, Sub-Paragraph 18, Lines 23 through 43, as written, rewritten, approved, disproved, and re-approved by a big bunch of bumbling bureaucrats who make more money than I do.”

  “Wow!” said Strutter. “I’ve finally met a government man at the trough who actually helps taxpayers?” He looked toward the sky. “Thank you Lord! Miracles do happen.”

  “Murder is murder!” acknowledged the Detective. “I will speak to Herbert Clapsaddle and prevent this Thanksgiving travesty.”

  “Thanks,” said Strutter, wiping his brow, what little there was of it. “Now I feel much better.” Then scratching the earth and not finding any worms, he added, “I think I’ll take another walk.”

  “And while you’re strolling, I’ll get busy fighting crime.” Sedgwick moved his eye patch from his right to his left eye.

  “I thought you only had one good eye.”

  “Nope. I do this to impress people.”

  “Well, it ain’t working. Try something else. Giving Tupperware parties can be effective.” Then Strutter stuck out his wings, fanned his tail feathers, and fully inflated his circular cocoon of leafy plumage before moving across his chicken-wire kingdom. The only thing missing in his strutting was music, a top hat, white spats, and a cane.

  *

  Hours later, before Sedgwick Segway could confiscate Herbert Clapsadde’s hatchet—his potential murder weapon—he found the farmer hanging inside the barn, a rope around his neck, a sharpened hatchet in his right hand.

  “He’s been murdered,” declared the gendarme.

  “Herbert, murdered?” gasped Myrtle, entering the barn. “Looks like suicide to me.”

  “A carving knife in his back says it ain’t so,” responded the lawman.

  “This is terrible, terrible, terrible,” sobbed tear-gushing Myrtle.

  “Yes, losing your husband of seventy-seven years is terrible.”

  “Seventy-eight,” corrected Myrtle, anticipating Social Security widows’ benefits. “And I’ve still got to make dinner tomorrow for sixty-four guests.”

  “Sixty-three now,” corrected Sedgwick.

  Myrtle slapped her fat thigh. “That’s right, Herbert won’t be there.”

  “I will find his killer,” promised Sedgwick.

  “Now,” sighed Myrtle, heading back to her kitchen, “I must get on with my life, and also find four and twenty blackbirds to bake in a pie if I can find my Betty Crocker Cookbook.”

  Sedgwick carefully examined the area under the dangling corpse. Then he knelt, picked up something, examined it with his magnifying glass, and said, “Hmmmm…what’s this?”

  *

  Sixty-three diners arrived for Thanksgiving, including a streetwalker, known to swap favors for Food Stamps. The table was covered with more food than the midnight buffet at the local Chief Wahoo Indian Casino.

  The Reverend Blister B. Bullett, who hiccupped through a prayer for the murdered Herbert Clapsaddle, was interrupted when Grandpa Pickle, after two quarts of hard cider, took a swing at his reflection in a mirror. He knocked out his false teeth, fell under the table, found his choppers, patted the streetwalker’s leg, and asked if she gave senior discounts.

  A big-breasted, store-bought turkey occupied the middle of the table under a big ceramic dome painted with, Remember the Alamo, a fond Clapsaddle travel memory.

  Guests included two male relatives long thought dead. Their stiff expressions never changed, although one smiled while eyeing dessert and the streetwalker.

  The guest of honor at the head of the table was Strutter, whose life had been spared by Myrtle Clappsaddle. A fork and knife were gripped in the tip of each feathered wing, a cloth napkin under the long red wattle that dangled under his beak.

  They say turkeys can’t smile, but there was a wide grin on Strutter’s face while he slurped soup, ate mashed potatoes, green beans, baked beans, sweat potatoes (topped with pecans and those tiny marshmallows), salads, olives, deviled eggs, asparagus, pickles, dinner rolls, butter, jams, jellies, three huge helpings of cranberry sauce, and two big pieces of apple and pumpkin pies.

  “I never eat turkey,” he explained, “unless we’re not related.”

  Strutter gave a rousing after-dinner speech about the pilgrims’ first American Thanksgiving, words widely quoted by the reporter from the Prairie Gazette-Upper Country News Beacon. Then, claiming he couldn’t eat another bite, he waddled onto the center of the table prepared to dance the Turkey Trot, when Detective Sedgwick Segway entered the room, raised his pistol, and shouted, “Don’t anyone leave the room! I know who murdered Herbert Clapsaddle!”

  “Who?” gasped the guests.

  Sedgwick stretched to his full five-feet-two inches, pointed at the guest of honor, and said, “Strutter…you’re a fowl engaged in foul play.”

  “That’s a ter-terrible p-p-play on words,” stuttered Strutter. “Even b-b-beneath a small-town g-g-gumshoe flatfoot like you.”

  “I’ve been saving it,” said the detective.

  The accused dashed toward the door.

  “Stop that killer!” demanded Sedgwick.

  “Got him!” yelled Grandpa Pickle who downed Strutter with a flying tackle. Then, acknowledging applause, bowed and again dropped his false teeth.

  “How did you know it was me?” questioned Strutter.

  “Elementary, my feathered friend,” said Sedgwick, who loved quoting Sherlock Holmes.

  “Other than the knife in Herbert’s back and the rope around his neck,” asked Myrtle, “what made you think he was murdered?”

  “Beneath Herbert’s hanging remains were fresh turkey feathers, and claw scratches in the dirt that matched Strutter’s note to the police.” Sedgwick pointed at Strutter. “And the only turkey within miles…is you!”

  Strutter jumped back on the table and overturned bowls of gravy, mashed potatoes, succotash, and those tiny little bowls of mixed nuts. “Detective,” he pleaded, “minutes after you left my coop, Herbert Clapsaddle came at me with his hatchet. Said he was going to ‘Kill me!’ It was either kill or be killed! I got him before he got me. I plead self-defense!”

  “Self-defense!” retorted Sedgwick. “That’s what all you murderers say.”

  “Herbert told Myrtle,” pleaded Strutter, now knee deep in two big bowls of cranberry sauce, “he was going to kill me for Thanksgiving. He said it over and over. I had a legal right to defend myself!”

  Myrtle jumped up. “Strutter’s right!” she shouted. “Herbert said he was going to chop off Strutter’s head. I’ll testify to that in court.”

  “Well, I’ll be dipped,” said the fuzz. “If what you say is true then it was self-defense, justifiable homicide.” He turned to the accused. “Strutter, if you’ll get your big feet out of those cranberries…you’re free to go. As an officer of the law,” added Sedgwick with a triumphant gesture, “I can say, this murder case is closed!”

  Strutter smiled, saluted, hopped off the table, and left a long red trail of cranberries on the dining room rug as he proudly waddled back to his coop.

  He’s still there. As the Cock-of-the-Walk he throws his head back, puffs out his big chest, droops his wings, vibrates his fanned tail feathers, gobbles, and slowly struts back and forth in his kingdom of old feathers and turkey droppings.

  His strutting has improved, because Myrtle—using her first Social Security widows’ check—bought Strutter a top hat, cane, tuxedo, and spats. Every Thanksgiving she imports a New Orleans band to play strutting music, including, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and George M. Cohan’s , “You’re a Grand Old Flag,”

  Maybe you’ve seen Strutter on TV. He’s very popular.

  Myrtle says she misses Herbert, especially when she needs someone to nag or interrupt.

  Ace Police Detective First Class Sedgwick Segway is still solving murders, but failing to impress other people by quoting Sherlock Holmes, even if he thoughtfully rubs his chin and says, “Elementary.”

  *

  There’s a moral to this story, but author Big Jim Williams doesn’t have time to explain it now, because he’s busy enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, including thick slices of white and dark turkey meat covered with lots and lots and lots of cranberry sauce.

  Leave It to Cleaver

  Lesley A. Diehl

  Thanksgiving, 1970

  Aunt Nozzie Summons

  I exuberantly whirled around my living room floor, and why not dance with joy? I was one fortunate woman. I had my PhD, had recently divorced my lush of a hubby and held the position of assistant professor at a public university in upstate New York. Sure the room was filled with furniture from auctions, secondhand shops and trash barrels I’d rummaged through from the side of the road, but it was all mine, and it was my life. I’d just been granted money from the college fund to begin a new research project, and I could envision a raise at the end of the year and a promotion in the near future. Life was perfect.

  And then the phone rang.

  It was my Aunt Rosalind, or Aunt Nozzie, as everyone called her. My relatives were shrinking in number since my Great Aunt Clara died several years ago, and what family was left consisted only of women, no men, not even a guy second cousin once removed. There appeared to be something about the genes on both sides of my family that just could not support the Y chromosome. Oh, of course, men figured in the family when they were young and everybody was responding to ticking biological clocks, but then the men kind of wilted like week old flowers forgotten in the hallway vase. We were hard on ou
r men.

  My mother, however, was still paired with husband number five. She’d worked her way through four others beginning with my father who died very young and then three other gents who did the wilting thing short years after marrying Mother. On occasion the authorities stepped in to investigate the deaths, but once they met my mother, they retreated with the understanding that marrying and then living with the woman was enough to snuff out the life in any man. Number five had real staying power, and we were all surprised.

  “Aunt Nozzie,” I answered, “so nice to hear from you.” Then I glanced up at the calendar on the wall by the phone and groaned.

  “Are you in pain, dear?” she asked.

  “You’re calling about Thanksgiving, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I’m assuming you haven’t had time with your new job and all to make many friends, so I thought you’d want to spend the holiday with those who love you most.”

  Sound reasoning, you may say, but those who love me best are those who have on previous Thanksgivings subjected me to spam instead of turkey, mashed potatoes with a man’s head in them and exploding cranberry sauce.

  Before I could say a word, Nozzie interrupted. “I think your mother and what’s-his-name will be here. When was the last time the whole family got together?”

  I pondered that question. Maybe never. And maybe that was just as well. Besides, I knew Mom would never consent to Thanksgiving at Nozzie’s. Her excuse was that my aunt reminded her too much of my father, whom Mom labeled her first and only real love.

  “I can’t stand seeing Nozzie and remembering how wonderful life was with your father. It just breaks my heart,” Mom would say.

  Mom lies a lot. The real reason she won’t spend time with Aunt Nozzie is she’s still jealous of all Nozzie had when Mom was with Dad and they lived on the farm. Nozzie worked in the printing plant and lived rent free with my grandparents, so she spent all her money on clothes, furniture, jewelry, all the things my mother did not have. Now that Mom did have money, having married wealthy men, wouldn’t you think she’d forget about the past? All of Nozzie’s money was gone. So bad was Nozzie’s situation that she started her own cottage industry last Thanksgiving. It did not end well. I know. I was there. And when I told Mom how badly it ended, she clucked her tongue and said, “Well, well, well,” my mom’s favorite phrase, which meant, “It was what she deserved.”

  “Mom won’t come. You’ll see,” I said to Nozzie.

  “That doesn’t mean you won’t, does it? I don’t want you to be alone on Thanksgiving. And even if you find a friend, bring him along.”

  Nozzie thought all my friends should be male. She was worried my eggs might go bad before I found someone who could use them to create another generation. Of course, we all knew he’d die young and the baby would surely be a girl.

  I thought about the monstrous events of past Thanksgivings and how I had exposed other friends to the family holiday table. I love my family, but I knew heredity had set me up to bond with them in a way no stranger could…or would…or should.

  “No way!” I shouted.

  “Darcie, you sound ashamed of your family.”

  I could hear the hurt in Nozzie’s voice.

  “I mean, no way could I bring a friend. All the friends I’ve made here have their own families.” I thought about that and realized it was true. Maybe one of them would invite me to their house for the holiday.

  “Don’t tell me you’re hanging out with married people. You need to find some single fellows. Why are you making friends with married men?”

  “I’m not. I have women friends, too, you know.”

  “Really? What’s the point?”

  That was Aunt Nozzie, the Lutheran version of a yenta.

  “I like women.” The minute the words fell from my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake.

  “Don’t tell your Grandma Mama that. She’ll never forgive herself for making you a lesbian.”

  Grandma Mama is the name we used for my mother’s mother.

  “How could she have made me a lesbian?”

  “She’s Swedish.”

  “So?” I still didn’t get it.

  “The Swedes are known to be notoriously sexually open and free.”

  “Well, she certainly didn’t make me a lesbian.”

  “Then who did?”

  “What?’

  Sometimes it was difficult to follow Nozzie’s line of reasoning, if reasoning is what you could call it. I took a deep breath.

  “I’m not a lesbian. I like guys. I married one.”

  “But it didn’t take. Maybe he knew you had lesbian tendencies.”

  I took another deep breath.

  “He was a drunk.”

  “So he didn’t notice then, right?”

  I gave up. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Well, keep it under your hat, would you? I want this to be a wonderful holiday. I’ve got big plans this year.”

  Oh, I could hardly wait to hear what her plans were.

  “I really don’t think I can make it. I’ve gained a little weight. The stress of a new job and all, so I’m dieting. No Thanksgiving feasting for me.”

  “Too bad. This may be your Grandma Papa’s last Thanksgiving.”

  Grandma Papa was my father’s mother and Aunt Nozzie’s, too.

  “Is she ill? What’s going on? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “You know Grandma Papa. She wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

  “How long…?”

  “Who can say? Just be there.”

  Back in the Arms of My Family

  I drove to Illinois from New York state, stayed overnight in Ohio and arrived the day before Thanksgiving. Grandma Papa rushed out the front door when I pulled up, and I threw my arms around her. She looked to be in good health, wearing her usual unusual apparel, her daughter’s hand-me-downs—my six-foot-tall aunt’s dress and shoes that Grandma Papa had renovated to fit her tiny under five-foot frame and tinier feet.

  I held her at arm’s length to take a good look at her. She was wearing Aunt Nozzie’s red blouse and purple skirt. The blouse hadn’t required much altering as she’d tucked it into the skirt waist band which she’d cinched in with what looked like a piece of clothes line with a cluster of purple grapes tied to it.

  “Uh, aren’t those the glass grapes that used to be on the coffee table?”

  Grandma Papa nodded and grinned at me. “Nozzie didn’t want them anymore, so she gave them to me.” Grandma Papa whirled around to show off her attire and almost fell out of her Nozzie-used-to-be shoes, tied to fit her feet with Grandma’s signature straps—pieces of grosgrain ribbon, purple, to match the grapes, of course.

  We were joined by Grandma Mama, you know, my mother’s mother. She dressed in clothes to fit her frame, so people who met her thought she was the normal one in the family.

  “Glitten, frugen plat,” she said to me.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m practicing my Swedish in case I go back there.” Grandma Mama hadn’t been at Thanksgiving last year because she was visiting relatives in Sweden.

  “And how was Sweden?” I asked. “I don’t think we had a chance to talk about it except for a few minutes on the phone.”

  “My relatives there are all crazy. Turns out they don’t speak a word of English or Swedish.”

  Aunt Nozzie banged through the front door and bounded down the front steps. She grabbed me in a huge hug and whispered in my ear, “Don’t listen to her. Of course they spoke Swedish, but she doesn’t. Never did.”

  “Glugen, glugen, glugen,” Grandma Mama sang to the tune of “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

  Aunt Nozzie wore one of her signature caftans, this one a mass of swirling turquoise and teal blue tropical birds on a background of sunshine yellow sateen. Turquoise drop earrings adorned her ears and four inches of bangle bracelets ran up her arm and jangled as she talked and gestured. Her hair, redder than a ripe cherry, glistened in the late fall sunlight.

  “What, no purple?” I pointed to her dress.

  “I told you things would be different this year.”

  I tried to put a smile of hope and encouragement on my face, but it felt more like I was putting on a brave face as the firing squad took aim.

  Nozzie took a long look at me. “Say you are a bit chubby, aren’t you?”

  I ignored her remark. It was true. I’d never had trouble with my weight before, and I was having difficulty losing the pounds. I hoped this Thanksgiving wouldn’t set me back. I’m an anxiety eater, and, if this holiday was anything like the ones in the past, I’d be packing on layers of fat.