A Year Down Yonder

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal death.

With the approach of Christmas, Miss Butler assigns Mary Alice’s home economics class to make hot pads (to protect surfaces from hot pots and pans) out of crocheted yarn and bottlecaps. Her partner is her closest friend, Ina-Rae Gage. For the upcoming Christmas program, Miss Butler has given Mary Alice the role of the Virgin Mary, which sparks some disdain among the student body since she’s from Chicago. Though excited, Mary Alice wonders how she’ll afford a proper costume. Now more than ever, she wonders where Grandma gets her money.

With the first snow, Mary Alice notices that Grandma bundles up in her late husband’s coat, boots, and rubber waders and spends long hours outside. Part of her work, it seems, has been gathering walnut husks. That night, at 10 o’clock, Grandma jerks awake in her chair and tells Mary Alice to bundle up. 

Grabbing a strange miscellany of objects—picture wire, wooden stakes, rabbit fur, a .22 pistol, and a vial of pungent-smelling, amber liquid—Grandma takes her on a long ramble over the snow-covered fields. Hearing a humanlike scream, Grandma fires the pistol. Mary Alice almost faints to see that she has killed a trapped fox.