Read On The Wings of Heroes Online
Authors: Richard Peck
On The Wings of Heroes (14 page)
“I thought you were Bill,” he said.
I stood there. How could he?
“Look at your feet,” he said. “You'll be wearing my shoes.” He had a good pair of Florsheims for church and the lodge. And he thought I was Bill?
“You're going to be taller than he is.”
Is, not was. Is. Is. And all I wanted to ask Dad was: Will he come back? Because when you're a kid, your dad knows everything and can hear a Halloweener a mile off, behind a building. Except I wasn't a kid, quite.
Now I'd forgotten why I'd come down here. Dad fished the hot towel out of the tub.
“Dad, how did that happen?” I pointed at his bad arm and the shoulder the army'd had to put back together. It was red and rippled from the hot towel. I broke the rule because you weren't supposed to mention his war.
“When I made sergeant, I was a courier,” he said. “I carried messages back and forth from the front. In France. The roads were blacked out and bad. I drove my motorcycle into a bomb crater. Tore my shoulder loose, bunged up my arm. Saved my life.”
I looked up.
“They sent me home, and I lived. I was in the Veterans' Hospital till right into 1919. Then I had to kick the morphine they'd given me for the pain. So that was my war.”
And more than I'd ever heard. “Did you hate it?”
“Every minute. And it wasn't the mud or the cold or even the eats.”
I waited.
“It was what people do to each other.”
I was trying to put it together in my mind. “So when Bill went, to this war . . .”
“I thought my war meant he wouldn't have to fight. I thought I'd failed him. I thought I'd let him down.”
Then the terrible thing happened. Tears started out of Dad's eyes and ran down under his glasses. My dad was crying, and this was why you shouldn't talk about his war. I didn't know what to do.
My feet moved me forward, and I was right there in front of him. Still his tears came, and he looked away. I saw where they'd snipped out the stitches in his face. And he was still crying, quiet in the night.
I leaned over a little, being that tall now. “Be Dad,” I said. “Be Dad.”
He straightened up, whipped off his glasses, swiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“That I will always be,” he said, and the words rang off the tiles.
“But I can't be Bill,” I said. Almost a wail.
He grabbed my shoulders. “You don't have to be. We'll get Bill back.”
Grandma Stood Guard . . .
. . . through the winter weeks. When I'd come home for noon, she'd be in the front window, filling it up, because a telegram could come at any time of the day. And the star she stood behind was silver now because someone of ours was missing in action.
Grandpa missed open country. The next best thing was the park that started where our street ended. Scooter and I had roamed all over it when we were kids. It was acres of sledding hills, a pond, picnic tables. At the other end was a forest preserve with trails blazed by the WPA.
Grandpa liked tramping out there in his big old snub-nosed hightopper shoes. We'd head out on a Sunday afternoon, and one time we came across a stand of sassafras trees, brittle in the wind.
He always had his folding knife on him, and he fell to work, digging the roots and bark. Over time, we brought back bushels of the stuff, though you weren't supposed to dig anything up. But Grandpa didn't quite get the idea of what a park is. “Country's country,” he said, and went to the basement to brew the sassafras into homemade root beer.
It was too complicated a recipe to follow, but it kept him busy in the basement over many nights. He poured his brew into Mason jars.
Just before daylight one February morning we were all scared out of our beds by the sound of gunfire. Ten or twelve sharp reports, like the house was surrounded.
I heard Dad's feet hit the floor in the room below me. The Hisers' bedroom light came on. We were all out of our rooms, milling.
“Dadburn it!” Grandpa barked, making for the basement in his nightshirt and Romeo bedroom shoes. The sassafras root beer had exploded, blowing the lids off all the Mason jars. Every one. How they came to go up all at once we never knew. The basement floor was awash with brown root beer, sizzling over by the furnace.
Dad was at the top of the basement stairs, bent over with his hand clapped over his mouth. Grandpa was mad as a hornet over all that work for nothing. But we were up for the day. Mom and Grandma elbowed each other out of the way, frying up eggs and our bacon ration.
The front doorbell rang, another sharp report. We stopped where we were. The spatula in Mom's hand. I raced through the house, and a kid in a delivery uniform was on the front porch in the first gray light.
It was a telegram. Another telegram, and they'd found Bill. He was alive, and safe.
We Got Bill Back . . .
. . . though he couldn't come home till after the war was over. But as Mom said, we could live with that.
In time we read his story in his V-mails. The raid over Stuttgart had been the worst one, and B-17s were knocked out of the sky all around them. Bill's crew fired their guns so fast they had to shovel the shell casings off the floor.
As bombardier, Bill sat up in the nose, and the German fighters were diving so close he could see the pilots' faces. The tail gunner was hit, and Plexiglas dust from his shattered turret blinded him. But Bill could tell him how to direct his fire, until the intercom went dead.
A 20-millimeter shell killed the waist gunner and broke the oxygen connection. They lost their place in the formation and tried for home, on their own, flying low through flak, breathing from bottles. At ten thousand feet, they saw their oil line was cut and began to bail out, hoping they were over France.
Bill came down alone in a plowed field, and the people running toward him were French Resistance fighters. They smuggled him out of sight and dressed a shoulder wound where a fragment had sliced into his flak suit.
They moved him at night from barn to barn and town to town, hiding him in farm carts, moving him nearer the coast. Then he hid in an attic in a town called Honfleur until they could get him into the hold of a fishing boat that zigzagged on a moonless night across the Channel.
The army thawed him out and patched him up and made him an instructor, on the base Somewhere in England. They were short of instructors with all the losses.
I was through seventh grade by the time we got Bill home. But we knew that cold February morning in 1944 that we would. After a while we came to believe that Grandpa Riddle's sassafras root beers blowing up and knocking us out of bed were a twelve-gun salute to our soldier, our particular hero.
I don't know now if we ate our breakfast. I remember us in the living room, each holding the telegram in turn. It passed from Grandma's big hand with the old-fashioned wedding ring embedded in it to Mom's, and their hands brushed.
Dad held it longer, then he passed it to Grandpa and said, “Mr. Riddle, you'll get your grandson back.”
Dad held Mom just for a minute before he broke away and cut off through the house, weaving because he was blinded and blurred.
He grabbed up his shotgun from behind the refrigerator, and a box of shells from under the sink. Now he was pounding off the back porch, veering out into the yard.
We watched him from the kitchen window. My dad out there barefoot in the frost in his pajamas, feeding the shells into the gun, then bringing it up to his good shoulder and firing off first one barrel, then the other.
Which was illegal within the city limits, but there were no fireworks in wartime, and Dad needed to split the sky.
I'd leave him there, my dad, feeding shells into the shotgun to wake up the world because we were getting Bill back. I'd leave him firing round after round into the leafless trees in the best morning of his life.
But he looked back at the house and waved me outside. Then I was out there with him, and he was handing me the shotgun. I felt the stock in my shoulder, and I sighted along the barrel to the bead because this was no piddly Daisy air rifle.
My head rang like a dinner bell, but I emptied both barrels into the morning, one for each of my particular heroes.
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