On The Wings of Heroes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  THE BOX ELDER TREE

  Before the War . . .

  Home Base . . .

  Smiley and Jewel Hiser . . .

  The Street . . .

  The Last Halloween . . .

  The Dwindling Year . . .

  REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR

  Only Fifteen Shopping Days . . .

  A Stack-of-Pancakes Morning . . .

  Miss Mossman . . .

  The Phillips 66 Station . . .

  Eight-to-Five Orphans . . .

  The Whole World Was Golden . . .

  Scooter Put a Pin in Midway Island . . .

  Dad Could See in the Dark . . .

  Now the Government Wanted Milkweed . . .

  A Teacher Shortage . . .

  In Scooter’s Opinion . . .

  War Stamp Thursday Came Around . . .

  Under Miss Titus . . .

  JALOPY JULY

  Spring Took Its Sweet Time Coming . . .

  By That Summer of 1943 . . .

  But She Would . . .

  The Jalopy Parade . . .

  THE STAR IN THE WINDOW

  Four Stars Hung on Our Street . . .

  What the Government Wanted Now . . .

  All Europe Waited for the Invasion . . .

  Droning Bombers Fanned Out Over Europe . . .

  When the Telegram Came . . .

  It Was the Worst Time . . .

  Grandma Stood Guard . . .

  We Got Bill Back . . .

  The Army Air Force cadet returns home.

  The whole world was golden with forsythia in bloom that noontime when Bill walked me home for lunch. He’d come off the morning train with just time to see Mom first. His uniform buttons sparked sunlight, and there was a little strut in his step. I rode all the way home on the wings of my hero. So did Scooter, as far as his house.

  When Bill and I got home, Mom had all our favorites. Toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. A pie was in the oven.

  Bill was only home for a few days before he had to report for training. On Saturday he went out to Dad’s station, and I tagged along. I shadowed him the whole time, trying to match his stride and memorize him for later.

  ALSO BY RICHARD PECK

  NOVELS FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Amanda/Miranda

  Are You in the House Alone?

  Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats

  Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

  Close Enough to Touch

  Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt

  The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

  Dreamland Lake

  Fair Weather

  Father Figure

  The Ghost Belonged to Me

  Ghosts I Have Been

  The Great Interactive Dream Machine

  Here Lies the Librarian

  The Last Safe Place on Earth

  A Long Way from Chicago

  Lost in Cyberspace

  Princess Ashley

  Remembering the Good Times

  Representing Super Doll

  The River Between Us

  Secrets of the Shopping Mall

  Strays Like Us

  The Teacher’s Funeral

  Those Summer Girls I Never Met

  Through a Brief Darkness

  Unfinished Portrait of Jessica

  Voices After Midnight

  A Year Down Yonder

  NOVELS FOR ADULTS

  Amanda/Miranda

  London Holiday

  New York Time

  This Family of Women

  SHORT STORIES

  Past Perfect, Present Tense

  PICTURE BOOK

  Monster Night at Grandma’s House

  NONFICTION

  Anonymously Yours

  Invitations to the World

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2008

  Copyright © Richard Peck, 2007

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL BOOKS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Peck, Richard, date.

  On the wings of heroes / Richard Peck.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A boy in Illinois remembers the home-front years of World War II, especially his

  two heroes—his brother in the Air Force and his father, who fought in the previous war.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-65257-8

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is for my sister, Cheryl

  THE BOX ELDER TREE

  Before the War . . .

  . . . the evenings lingered longer, and it was always summer when it wasn’t Halloween, or Christmas.

  Long, lazy light reached between the houses, and the whole street played our version of hide-and-seek, called only by olly-olly-in-free and supper time.

  Before I could keep up, I rode my brother’s shoulders, hung in the crook of Dad’s good arm. I rode them across the long shadows of afternoon, high over hedges, heading for home base, when our street was the world,

  before the war, when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Home Base . . .

  . . . was a branchy box elder tree in front of the Hisers’ house out by the curb. We could count on the Hisers not to mind when we pounded in from all directions to tag out on their tree. We plowed their sod when we skidded home, bled all over their front walk when we collided, knocked loose the latticework under their porch.

  Big Cleve Runion, who was nineteen years old, lit once in the middle of their syringa bush in an explosion of sticks, and it didn’t fill out again till after the war. But the Hisers had no kids and were getting on in years. They said they got a kick out of us. They were the rare grown-ups who liked noise, and Mr. Hiser was deaf.

  Nobody was a stranger before the war. Everybody played. Dogs too, yapping at our heels. Dogs we didn’t even know. They weren’t locked up or walked in those days. They ran wild like the rest of us. Kids younger than I was were in the game, and big sweating galoots like Cleve. Kids from the other streets, and girls. Once in a while, dads, before they went to war or worked Sunday shifts. Always my dad.

  We played to win. One time a big boy was it—Cleve or one of the Rogerses—and we took off for the alley to hunker behind the hollyhocks, my brother Bill
and I. Our breathing was like dry leaves while a cracking voice yelled numbers into the tree. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.”

  When we heard in the distance, “Here I come, ready or not,” Bill swung me up on his shoulders. We bobbed and weaved across a patchwork quilt of backyards, from one garbage can to another. Like magic, Dad was there by the Hisers’ back drain spout.

  In a Knute Rockne handoff, Bill passed me to him. I hung like a hammer off his belt. My feet danced in air, my head hung. There we came around the house, Dad pumping and wheezing, panting and red-faced with his bifocals fogging. Car keys and change rang in his pocket.

  His timing was better than a kid’s. Whoever was it never saw us coming, and it could have been Jinx Rogers, who played basketball on the starting five. I slapped the tree personally.

  One time Dad dropped me. On a hot evening I oozed out of his slick arm and did a cartwheel, landing across the rocks around the Hisers’ flower bed. The air went out of me, but there wasn’t time to cry. Dad scooped me up and ran to the tree. I took giant strides in the air just above the grass, and we tagged in with seconds to spare.

  Later, when I’d outgrown the crook of his arm, when Bill was away, Dad stayed in the game a little longer. He’d find another toddler to tote. Or he’d erupt, all on his own, a hundred and ninety pounds, out of the Hisers’ thrashing bushes and swerve toward the tree. His work shoes slapped the bricks of the street before he could get himself stopped. But he always let himself get caught if he didn’t have a kid in his arms.

  “He’s the biggest kid on the block,” Mrs. Jewel Hiser said from her porch, over the spirea, “that Earl Bowman.”

  Smiley and Jewel Hiser . . .

  . . . were country folks who’d retired into town when Hitler invaded Poland. Mrs. Hiser had seen newsreels of refugees fleeing the Nazis along rural roads, pushing all their belongings in baby carriages.

  She believed the rumor that if we got into the war, there’d be no gas or tires. We’d all be trudging along on foot like the refugees. So the Hisers bought the second bungalow from the corner behind the box elder tree. There they settled into their porch swing to await invasion.

  Mrs. Hiser said she saw World War Two coming before Roosevelt did. Way before. She’d never been easy in her mind since the Hindenburg blew up, which she said was a Sign. She was a great one for Signs and could describe the exploding Hindenburg like she’d been on it.

  Passengers burning alive staggered on fleshless feet through its melting steel skeleton. Mrs. Hiser had a fine sense of doom and kept a scrapbook of clippings about automobile accidents and house fires.

  Her tales were always worth hearing again, unless you were my mom, who said once was all she needed. The Hisers played to a full porch for the one about a nephew of hers who’d skidded on his sled. He shot under an International Harvester truck and scalped himself.

  They were living history to me, the Hisers, older than Dad. Mr. Smiley Hiser drove a 1930 Essex. Mrs. Hiser had played piano for silent movies before talking pictures came in. She played by ear, whatever that meant, and could render any song as long as it wasn’t new.

  If you asked her for “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Mairzy-Doates,” she’d just look at you. But to show us what real music was, she’d spring out of the swing and slip indoors to her upright piano. We waited for the crack of her knuckles, then “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or “Too Much Mustard” or “If You Knew Suzy” or even “Papa Get a Hammer, There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head” pounded out in the night.

  Both Hisers were musical, though Mr. Hiser was deaf. When they sang “Just a Song at Twilight” in close harmony, they held hands. Which amazed me in people of their years.

  On hot nights Mrs. Hiser remembered a boy cousin of hers who got lost in the Blizzard of 1896, between the cow barn and the house. He froze nearly to death and shook so bad he bit off the tip of his tongue.

  “How did you get him to stop shaking?” somebody always had to ask.

  “We never did,” Mrs. Hiser recalled. “We just tied him to the churn and made butter.”

  We hung on her words and waited for the cackle of her laugh. She kept a lace handkerchief down the vee of her housedress for wiping under her glasses because she seemed to be laughing or crying most of the time.

  “Get her to tell you about Jimmy Johnson and the cornpicker again,” Dad mentioned to me one night after supper. I didn’t ask why.

  You could hear a pin drop whenever Mrs. Hiser ran that one past us. It was a ghost story, and she’d seen one.

  “You want to hear that again?” she said, later on in the evening, closer to lightning-bug time.

  Scooter was on hand that night, and the Bixby sisters, and me, naturally. We perched in a row on the porch rail under the hanging ferns. The story was about the early days of mechanized farming when the tractor took over from the team and the motorized cornpicker came in.

  The cornpicker revolutionized farming, but it had a flaw. You wanted to be careful or it’d take your hand off. There was a generation of one-armed farmers because of it, so this was a story right up Mrs. Hiser’s alley.

  Mr. Jimmy Johnson was their country neighbor down in Moultrie County. He was a good farmer, but slow to adapt to modern ways. He bought himself a cornpicker, then lost a hand pulling stalks out of the snappers because he’d neglected to shut down the engine.

  She could make you see that ripped-off hand vanishing into the chomping cornpicker. In some of her tellings it wrenched the whole arm off at the shoulder. Popped it off like a wishbone.

  Mr. Johnson had stood there in shock, watching the cornpicker eat his arm, along with his shirtsleeve and the button on his cuff. In all her tellings, blood went everywhere. Mr. Johnson left a trail of it up to the road, where he died in a drainage ditch. The Bixby girls clung to each other. Scooter’s profile was freckled green chalk in the twilight.

  “Everybody turned out for the funeral,” Mrs. Hiser remembered, and Mr. Hiser nodded. “Will I ever forget Jimmy laid out in his coffin? The blacksmith carved an artificial arm to fill out his sleeve, with a hook at the end. Crossed on his chest was his good hand and the hook.”

  We quaked on the railing as the coffin lid closed, and I was real alert now.

  There was more to come, as we knew. How well Mrs. Hiser remembered a certain night weeks later. From her country kitchen door she saw a strange and far-off light, down the picked rows of corn in the late Mr. Jimmy Johnson’s field.

  Now she was on her back step, dishrag in hand, drawn by the eerie, changing glow. It was like a bobbing lantern, but different. She’d stood transfixed beside her cream separator.

  By now I was pretty sure Dad was under the porch, or in the spirea. He had to be around here somewhere, about to improve on the story and scare us all senseless. I was trying my darnedest to be ready.

  “Then I saw Jimmy Johnson out there in his field,” Mrs. Hiser said, almost too quiet for Mr. Hiser to hear, “real as the living man, with a lantern in his only hand.”

  I listened hard for Dad, but he seemed to miss his moment.

  “He held the lantern high, and he was looking everywhere,” Mrs. Hiser said. “Then I heard him myself, a voice that moaned like the windpump.

  “‘Where’s . . . my . . . hand?’ the ghost of Jimmy Johnson cried.

  “‘Where’s . . . my—’”

  Beside her, Mr. Hiser turned to Mrs. Hiser. Scared himself even after all these tellings, he reached for her. Her hand reached back, to close over . . . a wooden arm with a hook at the end.

  Her head bobbed like a blue jay when she saw this inhuman thing in her lap. The hook gleamed. She gasped, and her corsets creaked like a ship in a storm. When her scream split the night, porch lights winked on.

  Jimmy Johnson’s cold hook had appeared in her lap in place of Mr. Hiser’s hand. Mrs. Hiser rocketed out of the swing. When she came down, her lace-up shoes hit the floor hard enough to drive tacks. Jimmy Johnson’s artificial arm, back from the grave with hook attached, rumble
d off across the uneven porch. Mr. Hiser set his heels to keep from pitching out of the swing and bent double with laughter. Dad had to be doing the same, a house away.

  We never heard the cornpicker story again, though we always asked for it.

  I’d noticed Dad at his workbench in our basement, turning an old table leg on his lathe, fixing a coat hook to it with a wood screw. It was similar to the one that reached for Mrs. Hiser. How Mr. Hiser hid it till the right moment, I didn’t know. He must have sat on it there as they swung, together in the swing.

  The Street . . .

  . . . played hide-and-seek till the first frost when the leaves fell from our hiding places. We heard the Hisers’ stories and heard them again until a chill in the air sent the storytellers inside. Then came Halloween. Something in Dad lived from one Halloween to the next.

  For one of my first ones he’d carved a pumpkin big enough for several candles. It leered from our porch larger than life, beside the front door. I remember the smell of scorched pumpkin pulp. The rest is common knowledge.

  Bunches of boys roamed Halloween night, big boys from somewhere on the far side of the park. They didn’t trick-or-treat or wear costumes, not even sheets. They were there to soap your windows, shave your cat, pull siding off your house, do something nasty down your mailbox, knock over pumpkins. Dad couldn’t wait.

  The spirea bushes around our front porch closed over his head when darkness fell. Dad had lit the pumpkin, prepared the porch, filled the buckets at his feet down among the spirea roots. Now he waited. No gang of boys could match his planning, his patience.

  They came, drawn like moths. It looked so easy. They grouped down by the box elder and sprang from tree to tree, sprinting across our yard. They were quiet for boys as they brushed past the spirea on their way up our steps. The one in the lead carried a baseball bat to flatten the pumpkin. Ganging closer, they crested the porch. Then their world went awry.