On The Wings of Heroes (10 page)

Beverly sat at her desk, kind of clenched up, just under their line of fire. We were all ears.

The sizzle went out of Beverly's big mom. Her voice fell a mile. “I make twice the wages here I made back home. But it ain't—isn't worth it.”

She turned on Beverly, who was staring into the distance the way girls do around their mothers. “You're not cutting the mustard here,” her mom told her. “They're going to have to win the war without me because I'm taking you back down home. I'll get my old job back, and when I'm not set—sitting on your head, your grandma will be.”

Beverly erupted. “Grandma! NOT GRANDMA!”

We tried to picture her grandma, but couldn't.

Her mom checked the classroom clock and left.

It was nearly noon, but Miss Titus got us back to fractions in five-eighths of a second. When we left for lunch, Beverly stormed out first, opening the pocketknife she always carried to carve her desk with. We all gave her a running start. The other eight-to-five orphans opened their lunches. Doreen and Janis weren't sitting together.

When the coast was clear, Scooter and I strolled out to look along the curb for Miss Titus's banged-up Chevy with the suicide doors. When we spotted it, Scooter checked around on the street to find a pocketknife stuck in the flat front tire.

But it was worth it. Beverly was gone for good. And next semester Doreen made the honor roll. She was good at math, probably from counting all those dimes. And Janis did all right with her grades.

Over lunchtime I called Dad at the station to see if he could locate a tire for a '33 Chevy. He said he'd scout around and put out some feelers.

Without Beverly in school, it was like a day off.

In the afternoons, we had music, not Miss Titus's best subject. When she raised her voice in song, she sounded like her mama cawing from the bed. But we were warbling, “From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foooaaam—” when we got our last visitor of the day.

It was Dad.

It was definitely Dad in the door, grinning and doffing his Phillips 66 cap. He and Miss Titus had about the same amount of hair. A recapped tire hung in his good arm. He spotted me, so he was in the right place. Then he saw Miss Titus.

And Miss Titus saw him. She lowered the pitch pipe and squinted through her specs. “Earl Bowman?”

I flinched.

“Yes, ma'am,” Dad said, somewhat flushed. At home I'd never quite mentioned we didn't have Miss Landis anymore.

“That's my boy.” Dad pointed me out.

“I knew he was yours as soon as I caught him in my barn,” Miss Titus said.

I hadn't happened to mention that to Dad either.

“The apple never falls far from the tree,” Miss Titus observed. “Remember the paddle?”

Dad winced and reached around behind himself.

“Teaching isn't what it was,” Miss Titus remarked. “Why are you bringing a tire into my classroom?”

“You evidently need one, and we give full service,” Dad said. “I have an idea your spare's shot.”

“Tires are worth their weight in gold these days. There's a war on,” Miss Titus said. “What are you charging for that tire? I see it's a Goodyear. And your labor, young man?”

Young man? The class gasped.

“Miss Titus, you don't owe me a thing,” Dad said. “It's all the other way. You were the best teacher I ever had.”

Miss Titus twitched. “I was the only teacher you ever had, Earl Bowman. All eight grades at Sangamon School.”

“And the best,” Dad said.

. . . we learned a lot more than we'd meant to. Spelling counted. Everything counted, and she ran our grade like Parris Island boot camp for the marines. She even brought Walter Meece almost up to speed.

Also Miss Titus was a St. Louis Cardinals fan, a big one. Months after the Dodgers threw away their lead, and the Cards went on to take the Series away from the Yankees, Miss Titus was using their stats in our arithmetic lessons.

I asked Dad if she'd had a mustache back when she taught him.

“It was just beginning,” he said.

A classroom poster read:

 

To buy toothpaste now, you had to turn in the old used-up tube to the drugstore. Coffee vanished, and President Roosevelt told people to reuse their coffee grounds.

“I will if he will,” Dad said.

Now the war effort needed kitchen fats and bacon grease. You were to save it up in a container. Then you got extra ration points when you took it to the grocer. Scooter said a single pound of cooking fat was glycerin enough for fifty .30-caliber bullets. A notice in the newspaper read:
which was the first time I'd heard Mom laugh in a while.

She was counting off the days till Christmas and having Bill home. He was night-flying now, and we were hoping he'd be done with that and home for the holidays.

But by December when the war was a year old, the army sent him straight on to bombardier school. The army seemed to change its mind a lot. He wrote from Deming, New Mexico, that they were training him on the Norden bomb sight. He had to strip and reassemble it in the dark, and they had to burn their class notes as soon as they'd memorized them.

So you had to be able to keep a secret.

Bill wouldn't be home, but Christmas crept up anyway. We pooled our sugar ration and baked early, to mail him his favorites.

“He'll be home in the spring before they ship them overseas. He'll be wearing his wings and his second lieutenant's bars, and he'll be on top of the world,” Dad said, for Mom's benefit.

On Christmas Day we three went out hunting. Come to find out, Dad had taken Mom out hunting the day he asked her to marry him.

They carried their guns broken over their arms across the crusty fields. I walked in their frosty footprints. Dad's big treadmarks. The smaller prints of Mom's boots that laced up above her skirt tails. I walked behind them—Earl and Joyce Bowman. Pale sun played through the ice on the branches. They didn't kill anything, and I couldn't, not with a piddly Daisy air rifle, which wouldn't dent tin. But that wasn't why we were out here. If they'd seen anything to kill, they'd have let it go.

In the evening Mr. and Mrs. Smiley Hiser came over with a fruitcake from last year and their own ration of coffee. We sat in the safe kitchen with the steaming, streaming windows. We kept Christmas and waited for warm weather, and my brother Bill.

JALOPY JULY

. . . and Bill didn't get home till June.

They started rationing shoes that February, and my feet were growing faster than three pairs a year. We were down to twenty-eight ounces of meat a week and four ounces of cheese. Down in St. Louis they were eating horse meat.

On Tuesdays now we wore our Cub Scout uniforms to school, and the pack met afterwards. Scooter and I had been in and out of Cubs for a year. The pack kept collapsing under us. You needed a den mother, and you wanted it to be somebody else's mother, not yours. But our den mothers kept getting war jobs or moving away or just giving up.

Now Hoyt Albers's mom took us on. We did regulation army calisthenics in her front yard while she watched from the porch. Scooter and I thought we were getting a little old for this. Knowing the secret Cub handshake and what WEBELOS meant wasn't the big deal it used to be. But we thought we had a great Cubmaster. This was a Boy Scout who came to our meetings and took charge of our pack.

Ours was Carlisle Snyder, who wore his Scout uniform plastered with badges and medals to our den meetings. We tied a lot of knots under his direction, and he was pretty good with Walter Meece, who needed extra time for everything. Carlisle was in ninth grade, taller than Mrs. Albers, and shaved. He was pretty much who all us Cubs wanted to be.

Besides, the Community Paper Drive was starting up, the biggest collecting campaign of the war so far, and we were competing citywide as Cub dens and Scout troops.

Scooter wasn't crazy about wearing his Cub blue and yellow, even the neckerchief. “There's more to war than wearing a uniform,” he said. But we wore ours when we paired up for the paper drive.

Off we went again, pulling our wagons over the old scrap metal route. More people worked now and weren't home during the day. We were back in the Country of the Old. Not Mr. Stonecypher. There wasn't any paper in his attic, and his basement was off-limits because of the still.

“Old Lady Graves?” Scooter said.

“You knock,” I said.

“What this time?” she said when she flung open her back door. She was about Miss Titus's age, but not as good-looking. Her scalp bristled with curlers. She had enough metal on her head to build a Jeep.

“Paper,” Scooter said. “When we turn in a thousand pounds apiece, we get General Eisenhower's medal.”

“Do tell,” she said. “Start with the basement.”

It was real dank, though she'd kept every paper ever delivered to her. But water stood in her basement, and the newspapers had mostly turned into towers of foul mush. We took from the top and were up and down her back stairs with yellow piles.

Then she sent us up to her attic. “While you're up there, bring down my dress dummy.”

We moaned.

“And my sewing machine. I've got to start making my own clothes again,” Old Lady Graves hollered. “There's a war on, you know.”

Her dress dummy looked like her, but better. It had no head. Her sewing machine was a foot-pedal Singer with a rubber drive belt. It would be swell scrap, and it outweighed us. It barely budged, but we got it down, a stair step at a time. Only then could we go back for her collection of
Saturday Evening Post
s and
Ladies' Home Journal
s.

Hefting a stack higher than his head, Scooter tripped over something and fell flat. Magazines flew. I didn't laugh, but it was funny, and he'd skinned his knee. He'd tripped over a bag of something. “What is it anyway?” he said.

It was a hundred pounds of sugar.

“Old Lady Graves is a hoarder,” Scooter whispered, which was no big surprise. We looked closer at the dusty bag. It was hard as a rock, and moth- and mouse-eaten. The lettering on it was faded. Scooter smacked his forehead. It was from World War I.

We sat on it, wringing wet from all our work. Scooter still thought we were giving too much to the war effort. But we wanted those medals of General Eisenhower's.

 

We were even-steven about it, piling half our paper on Scooter's back porch, half on mine. We'd finally figured out we had to take twine and tie our scrap paper into bundles. We were dragging full loads home one afternoon when a big stake-bed REO truck pulled up beside us. Three Boy Scouts from Troop 15 were up in the cab. The one at the wheel was an Eagle Scout, old enough to drive. He had badges all over him.

We were pulling these puny Radio Flyer wagons that kept tipping over, and now we looked up. It was a marvel how much paper you could get with a truck and a whole troop collecting together. Six or eight Scouts stood up there in the truck bed in the paper piles. The Eagle Scout leaned out from the driver's seat.

“You two. We'll take your paper.”

We tried not to get any smaller when the Scouts jumped down off the truck.

“It's ours,” Scooter said. “We collected it.” But his voice hadn't changed yet.

“You want to fight eleven of us for it, squirt?” the Eagle Scout said. “Put up your dukes.” And they all snorted. Scout snorts.