Meanwhile, Grandma Dowdel helps make a thrifty “burgoo stew” out of leftover vegetables and offcuts to be sold to attendants for a-dime-a-cup. However, he accidentally manages to shoot out the tire of a Legionnaire’s car while trying to hit a rabbit. When the American Legion holds a shooting contest to commemorate Armistice Day, Augie Fluke attempts to show off his shooting skills to Mary Alice. When the principal’s son, Augie Fluke, comes to be served, his bald, raw scalp reveals that he was the Halloween prankster that Grandma Dowdel covered in glue. She uses them to bake pies to serve at the school’s Halloween party. So, Grandma Dowdel drives the farmer’s tractor into the tree, knocking down more nuts. They agree but find that he tricked them, as there are very few fallen pecans. Later, she and Mary Alice do a favor for a farmer named Old Man Nyquist, who says they can have all the pecans that have fallen from his tree if they tow his wagon back to his farm. Grandma Dowdel stops a Halloween prankster by setting up a booby trap that covers the boy in hot glue. Mildred has to walk several miles without shoes in order to get home instead of bullying Mary Alice. However, Grandma Dowdel simply invites Mildred in and then takes the girl’s shoes and puts them on her horse, which she then sets loose. This turns out to be good advice as Mildred quickly starts picking on Mary Alice and, assuming that she is a spoiled city girl, follows her home on horseback to demand a dollar from Grandma Dowdel. When she takes Mary Alice to her new school, she advises her granddaughter to avoid her classmate Mildred Burdick as her family is known to be bad news.

Grandma Dowdel greets Mary Alice by complaining that her radio will be noisy and her cat will need feeding.

However, her family are struggling during the Great Depression and cannot currently afford to look after her. She is not looking forward to living in what she assumes will be an isolated, backward, country settlement. It begins in 1937, with the protagonist and narrator, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, taking a train from Chicago to an unnamed rural town to live with her grandmother. A sequel to Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago, A Year Down Yonder explores assumptions, rough justice, and growing up through the continuing adventures of Mary Alice and the Dowdel family.

A year down under richard peck