The Curious Miss Crabtree – Text

Paul Tag (2008-05-13). The Errant Ricochet: Max Raeburn’s Legacy. iUniverse. Kindle Edition.

The Curious Miss Crabtree*

Laconia, New Hampshire
December 1957

Yes, I admit it. After all these years, I cop to the fact that I was scared that afternoon. Scared to death! I was ten years old. I also recall, though, that I wasn’t about to show any fear to my younger brother, Jimmy, age seven.

I remember that it was cold, and the snow on the sidewalk was ankle deep as my brother and I trudged toward our assignment. I didn’t want to go, but our mother gave me no choice. It was almost Christmas, and she made it clear it was the neighborly thing to do. I asked Mom if Jimmy could go along—not because I wanted his company, but because I figured Miss Crabtree would think twice before killing both of us, knowing it would be that much harder to dispose of two bodies.

The shuttered windows that faced us looked scary, as did the dark entryway. Miss Crabtree had been our next-door neighbor as long as I could remember. As a liberal, mature grown-up, I can now say she had a right to her ways, strange as they were. But back then, her behavior was foreign and frightening to me.

My knock on the door was timid. I hoped she wouldn’t answer. We could go home and tell Mom she never came to the door—and avoid serious bodily harm.

“Do you think she’s sick?” Jimmy looked up at me. Seconds elapsed with no sound at all from inside the house.

“Could be.”

Unaware of the considerable danger lurking within, Jimmy suggested, “Why don’t you knock harder? No way could she hear your knock.”

This time I used the large doorknocker, in the shape of a woodpecker, producing a sound that was capable of raising the dead. What seemed like minutes ticked by, and I felt that we had given it our best shot and were off the hook. “I don’t think she’s home, Jimmy. We can come back another time.”

Then, unfortunately, we sensed movement. The door creaked open, just an inch, and then a few seconds later, a bit more. A pale face with no body attached peered out at about the five-and-a-half-foot mark—several inches above my line of sight.

“You boys selling something? Get lost!” The door began to close.

“No, Miss Crabtree! It’s us, Tommy and Jimmy, your neighbors. We’ve come to wish you a Merry Christmas. Mom made you some cookies.” Shaking, and not from the cold, I lifted the plate high so she could see.

Miss Crabtree’s eyes looked us up and down. She then stared beyond us, in front and to both sides, no doubt to make sure we weren’t harboring other juvenile salesmen.

“Oh, yes. I remember now. You two broke my bathroom window last summer, throwing your baseball back and forth. Never did understand how a pitched ball could go that far off course. Children, cats, and dogs were all in danger. Has your aim improved any?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’d say both Jimmy and me can now hit much more than the broad side of a barn, as you doubted back then. I was hoping you hadn’t remembered that.”

“I remember a lot more than that about you two. Most of it unpleasant.”

No one said anything. The silence added to my discomfort, but it seemed to me that, although she had spoken last, the conversational ball was still in her court, and it would be rude to speak until she reacted to our offering her cookies. Miss Crabtree, apparently unaware of my keen understanding of social etiquette, continued to stare back at us while occasionally glancing down the sidewalk.

Jimmy looked up at me, across to Miss Crabtree, and back to me again. Unsure of what to do next, he took off his left glove and pondered the wart that had grown on the back of his middle finger.

I was about to set the cookies on the stoop and beat a hasty retreat when the door opened fully, to reveal that Miss Crabtree was still in possession of her body. It was a thin one, dressed in blue corduroy pants and a red plaid shirt. Even though it was winter and cold, she wore open sandals, over red socks. Her sharp facial features and straight black hair reminded me why she was a favorite for Halloween pranks. It didn’t help that her last name fit her nature and elicited various unflattering observations from the neighborhood kids.

“You might as well come in. I can’t afford to heat the sidewalk.”

Uh-oh. I wasn’t counting on this. Should we turn tail and run? Too late! Jimmy stepped inside. I steeled myself. Miss Crabtree held open the door to the high, stone entryway. Her house was older than anyone else’s on the block, with massive rock walls surrounding the property. Ivy, now lifeless from the winter cold, grew on the sides of the house and made it look ancient. Some said the house was older than Miss Crabtree, but I found that hard to believe.

With Jimmy to the rear and me in the middle, Miss Crabtree ushered us past the stairway, past the living room, and past the den. The air smelled moldy, and it was dark, particularly after our eyes had gotten used to the bright snow outside. Jimmy grabbed hold of my jacket to avoid getting lost. We arrived in the kitchen, and Miss Crabtree stopped suddenly. I stopped as well, but Jimmy ran into me and knocked me down, whereupon I was able to study closely the rear-side construction of Miss Crabtree’s sandals. Although some of the cookies fell from the plate, I avoided complete embarrassment by retrieving most of them before she turned around.

Miss Crabtree turned and looked intently at us. I was beginning to wonder whether she wasn’t used to looking at someone the likes of my brother and me. Compared to our neighbor friends, though, I never thought we looked that unusual.

Thinking that it was now my turn to talk, I stood and raised the plate of cookies. “Here are your cookies. They’re real good. Jimmy and me ate two on the way over.”

It seemed to me that words took a long time to travel through the air in Miss Crabtree’s house. They eventually arrived, and she took the plate.

“Would you boys like some hot tea?”

Jimmy looked up at me, and I knew what he was thinking. Hot tea? Why can’t we have cocoa? But our parents had taught us always to be polite, particularly to anyone “senior” to ourselves, which meant most of the rest of the planet.

“That would be nice, Miss Crabtree. We’d love to have tea.” When Miss Crabtree turned to the stove, I kicked Jimmy to bring him into line. Because we had survived this long, my courage was coming back.

“Go. Sit. I’ll get the water boiling.” With the gas on the stove now turned to high, Miss Crabtree sat down opposite us at the kitchen table. Staring ensued. Up until then in my life, I had wondered about the saying, “A watched pot never boils.” It was then that I discovered its meaning.

Recognizing a lull in the action, Jimmy went back to examining his wart. Miss Crabtree then noticed it, too.

“What’s that? Where did you get that?” she demanded.

Jimmy was quick to reply. “It’s a wart. Mom says I must have touched a toad.”

The air must have gotten thicker because Jimmy’s words took an extra long time to travel across the table. But when they did arrive, Miss Crabtree took it as a call to action. She jumped to her feet.

“Something must be done! I’ll go get a pea.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, I mentally slapped myself on the forehead for not thinking of that solution myself. Not wanting to appear dumb, I stared knowingly at my brother.

Miss Crabtree dashed across the kitchen, opened a canister, and removed a single dried pea. She examined it carefully, no doubt to make sure it was a good one. She rushed back, reached across the table for Jimmy’s hand, and touched the pea to the wart. “I’ll bury the pea in the back yard as soon as the snow’s thawed, and that will be that.” She seemed satisfied.

I nodded, first at Miss Crabtree, and then at Jimmy. I could tell from his expression that he did not understand the finer points of medical theory.

About that time, the teakettle was boiling at full throttle. It seemed to me that it was time to make tea. But Miss Crabtree didn’t move. Obviously, the sound had not yet gotten to her. Finally, she pushed back the chair and looked us dead in the eyes. “If you never remember anything else in your lives, remember that the water must boil for a good two minutes before you steep the tea in the teapot.”

I never knew this rule but decided, right then and there, that if Miss Crabtree put so much stock in it, I had best remember it. Miss Crabtree made tea, not with tea bags, but with some sort of metal apparatus with holes in it. She seemed to know what she was doing, though.

“What is that, Miss Crabtree?” Jimmy asked. “Don’t you have any tea bags?”

Miss Crabtree turned around, annoyed at what she appeared to consider a naive question. “Don’t you boys know anything? This is a tea maker. You use loose tea by itself or in a tea maker. You steep the tea in the teapot for three minutes, never more than five.” In a maneuver not unlike the digital method favored by my fourth-grade reading teacher, she held the tea maker in her left hand and pointed to it with her right index finger. Miss Crabtree demonstrated how it worked and made clear that the only good cup of tea was made directly from fresh tea leaves—and not from a bag. My culinary skills, at least in the beverage department, were increasing by leaps and bounds. But Jimmy’s face made it clear he was approaching information overload.

Miss Crabtree poured three cups of tea from the teapot and then removed the wax paper from Mom’s chocolate chip cookies. We commenced eating and drinking.

Jimmy and I soon observed a gastronomic procedure we had never seen before. Miss Crabtree proceeded as if it were common practice. She dipped a cookie in the hot tea and took a bite. So as not to appear without culture, Jimmy and I followed suit. However, it soon became clear to both of us that there was some skill involved in performing this ritual. Our first attempts were unsuccessful. No sooner had we removed our cookies from the tea than the wet part of the cookie fell to the bottom of the cup. Finding the remains with our spoons was not a satisfactory experience.

By the time we had failed twice in our dunking attempts, Miss Crabtree apparently noticed something of interest on the ceiling, because her eyes suddenly rolled upward. Jimmy and I looked up, too, but we could see nothing out of the normal. Miss Crabtree impatiently explained that the cookie should remain in the tea no more than half of a second, preferably one-quarter. We appreciated her precision.

Armed with this new information, Jimmy and I became dunking masters. Between the three of us, we finished all the cookies. In contrast to what our mother would have said, Miss Crabtree gave no indication that we should stop until all the cookies were gone.

Having filled our stomachs with six cups of tea and at least twenty cookies among the three of us, even the earlier bursts of conversation seemed excessive, and we sat quietly. Miss Crabtree, apparently satisfied that she had memorized every detail in our faces, now looked across at the stove.

Suddenly, as if she remembered that the house was on fire, Miss Crabtree snapped to her feet, charged out of the kitchen into the living room, and hurried up the stairs. The courage that I had regained vanished. Was she going to get her gun, or worse, a knife? Jimmy, completely unaware of the potential danger and unaccustomed to such long periods of mental stimulation, started to doze.

I did the best to control my voice, so as not to alarm him. “Jimmy, wake up! We’ll go home soon. And whatever you do, don’t tell Mom we ate all the cookies with Miss Crabtree. Okay?”

As fast as she had left us, Miss Crabtree returned. She carried a small box, not really big enough to house a serious weapon. My fears, temporarily allayed, suddenly returned with a vengeance when she said: “Turn your heads and close your eyes!” I felt that the end was near.

But a minute passed, and we were still breathing. We could hear her sit down.

“Okay. You can look.”

Once again, we were looking across the table at each other. This time, however, our attention was drawn to the box Miss Crabtree had brought back. It was made of old green cardboard and had a thick layer of dust on the top. Miss Crabtree also noticed the dust and gave a mighty blow to remove it. Once the air cleared, and Jimmy and I stopped coughing, Jimmy couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“What’s in the box, Miss Crabtree?”

Realizing by now that it would take some time before he received a reply, Jimmy checked his wart once more to see if it was still there. I prided myself on remembering that nothing would happen until Miss Crabtree buried the pea in the back yard.

“This is for you. You can take it home, but you can’t open it until Christmas. Understand?”

“We’ll wait, Miss Crabtree. We understand.”

* * *

Years later, long after she had passed away, I would reflect back on Miss Crabtree, her curious ways, the December afternoon we had survived in her house, and what I had learned.

I learned that dunking cookies in tea made them taste even better than eating them dry. I learned that to make proper tea, water in the teakettle has to boil for two full minutes. I also learned that good tea is made from fresh tea leaves, never from a bag, and that it must steep for three to five minutes. And I learned that modern medical theory doesn’t explain everything. Yes, Jimmy’s wart was gone by May.

Beyond those bits of knowledge, however, Jimmy and I were both touched by the present in the old green box that Miss Crabtree gave us. Even though the lid was loose, and we could have looked at any time, we respected her instructions and did as she had asked.

After Jimmy and I had opened all of our presents on Christmas morning, Mom and Dad noticed the unwrapped green box under the tree.

Jimmy volunteered. “That’s from Miss Crabtree. She told us not to open it until today.”

I lifted the old green lid slowly. Jimmy and I peered in together, disappointed at that moment, but less and less so as the years went by—because the contents would fix forever in our memory that afternoon with Miss Crabtree. Inside were two antique tea makers. And inside each of them was one small pea. In her own special way, Miss Crabtree had made absolutely clear how each was to be used.

* Originally published in Green’s Magazine: Volume XXXI, Number 2, Winter 2003, pages 19-25; Green’s Educational Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 3236, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P SH1