A Year Down Yonder (13 page)

I
was married in Grandma’s house, in the front room. It was a sunny day in warm weather. She’d taken down the stove, and the windows of the bay stood open, over the bobbing snowball bushes.

It was in the last year of the war, and you can’t imagine how things were then. The war scattered people to the four winds. Joey was flying B-17 Fortress missions over Germany, and so my heart lived in my mouth. Dad was doing war work with Boeing out in Seattle. He and Mother were living there. Travel was next to impossible, so they couldn’t be there. Even the bridegroom’s family couldn’t come to the wedding.

It would have been easier to get married in Chicago. I’d held on to the apartment in Rogers Park and took the El every morning down to the Tribune Tower to my cub reporter job. Those “Newsy Notes” had paid off in time. Though it meant I’d have to ride the wartime version of the Wabash Blue Bird, sitting on my luggage in the aisle, I wanted to be married in Grandma’s house.

I’d saved up on my ration card for new shoes and a suit from the basement store at Marshall Field. Though I wore a hat and gloves, I was married bare-legged because you couldn’t get nylons by then, for love or money.

Then it was all a last-minute rush because I had to marry my soldier on a three-day pass.

Grandma baked the wedding cake. Sugar was hard to come by, though not for her. She made me a nosegay bouquet to carry—lilies of the valley and Queen Anne’s lace from her yard, poked through a paper doily. She wore her floral print with the net collar, the dress she’d worn years ago to the county fair.

Reverend Lutz of the United Brethren Church stood by the platform rocker to perform the ceremony. When he asked who gave the bride away in marriage, Grandma said, “That’d be me.”

She handed me over. Then she looked aside, out the bay window, blinking at the brightness of the day. I know because I looked back for one more glimpse of her. Then I married Royce McNabb.

We lived happily ever after.

Richard Peck, the acclaimed author of over twenty-five novels, has won the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature.
A Long Way from Chicago,
his prequel to
A Year Down Yonder,
was named a Newbery Honor Book, a National Book Award finalist, an ALA Notable Book, and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Mr. Peck grew up in Decatur, Illinois, and now lives in New York City.