On The Wings of Heroes

by Richard Peck

“There wasn’t even a war then,” Scooter said.

  From the regulation canteens on our web belts we drank the last of our water. A breeze drifted through. It was breezier than a cane-bottom chair, as Mrs. Hiser would say. I dozed.

  The barn turned into a covered bridge, also rickety, and we were thundering through it in our brand-new Pan American straight from the dealership. It was the days of yore, and the President of the United States was . . .

  “Warren G. Harding,” Scooter mumbled out of his own daydream. He reached to squeeze the invisible bulb on the missing horn. “Beep, beep,” he sang out.

  Soon after that, an explosion about busted my eardrums. Hail rattled the roof from a clear blue sky. Scooter peeled out of his side. I slid off my seat. We thought about rolling under the car, like school air raids. This could be the real thing.

  “Scram!” Scooter yelled. “The barn could be coming down.” And true, it was raining roofing.

  We cut out, then pulled up short. A black shape stood in the barn door against the sunlight. The figure held a shotgun.

  I may have screamed. Scooter did.

  The hail on the roof had been buckshot out of the gun. I’d never been so scared, and dying this far behind the lines didn’t seem fair.

  “Well anyway you’re not tramps,” the figure said.

  Our eyes adjusted. It was a dried-up woman with a face like a walnut. She’d lowered her blunderbuss. Had that just been a warning shot? The gun hung broken open in the crook of her wrinkled arm, like she’d been out hunting. Her skirt tails were in her boots. What century were we in?

  “But boys in a barn are trouble enough,” she said. “Start toward me.”

  My heart lurched, and I had to follow, keeping even with Scooter. “It was that Beep Beep of yours that gave us away,” I muttered to him. His web belt was way bigger than Scooter’s waist. It worked down over his knees as we walked, closer and closer to this old woman and the barrels on that shotgun, still smoking.

  “Smoking?” she said. “Cornsilk in a dry barn?”

  “N-n-no,” we said.

  “What’s in those canteens?” she inquired. “Home brew? Rot gut? Corn liquor?”

  “N-n-no,” we said.

  Scooter’s belt wound down to his ankles, and his canteen settled in the dust.

  “Town boys,” she noticed. “What’s your business in my barn?”

  Scooter found his tongue. I’d left mine somewhere. “We’re collecting milkweed for the war effort,” he piped.

  “Did you find much milkweed growing inside my barn?” She wore tortoiseshell spectacles, old as the car. Her magnified gaze crackled through them.

  “We like your old automobile,” Scooter said in a small voice.

  “And you just make yourselves at home on other people’s property?”

  We pretty much did. We’d been in and out of other people’s attics and basements all summer long, scouting for scrap. We didn’t mention it.

  “Up to the house.” She nodded toward it. Scooter stepped out of his belt, and then we were on the porch, out of the sun—and options. A slop jar, covered, stood on the floor. The screen wire on the door billowed out.

  “Inside,” she said, parking her shotgun against the house, which was some relief.

  Inside, hogs wouldn’t have come as a surprise. But it was mostly stacks of books. Shelves with more books ran across the top of a closed door to another room. A kerosene lamp stood on a big table with a stack of newspapers and Time magazines. She’d been eating her lunch at one end, on oilcloth, when she heard intruders in her barn.

  “You. The talker,” she said to Scooter. “What’s your name?”

  If she got our names, our gooses were cooked. “Scott W. Tomlinson,” Scooter said. “Ma’am.”

  “And what do they call you?” She swiveled on a bony hip. Her dress was a feed sack.

  “. . . Davy.”

  “Bowman?” she said, but how did she know? Was she a witch? She looked it. Who was she?

  “I am Eulalia Titus. Miss.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” we lied softly.

  She sent Scooter around the back of her house. She had a jar of something cooling down her well and told him to bring it. “And watch where you step. Snakes.”

  Scooter scooted. I could feel myself turning pale because of snakes in the vicinity.

  “You better sit down,” Miss Eulalia Titus said. “You may have had a touch of the sun.”

  She’d been reading a new book by Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent. “You thought I was too far back in the sticks to know there’s a war on,” she said. So she read minds.

  Scooter came back with a jar of buttermilk. Miss Titus poured out three cheese glasses. It was barely cool, and I hated buttermilk.

  “I suppose you two are used to iceboxes,” she remarked.

  Actually, we were used to refrigerators.

  The three of us fit around the end of the table. Miss Titus was small and stringy, though of course she could blow you away. Scooter’s elbows were nowhere near the oilcloth, so he was minding his manners. A screen-wire dome among the books covered a tall cake with butter icing.

  We three were knee to knee. Miss Titus had a little mustache. “Just so you know,” she said, “that cake took two weeks’ sugar ration.”

  “Sixteen ounces,” Scooter said.

  She gave him a look. “You’re the sharpest tool in the shed, aren’t you?”

  He looked modest. Also, he had a buttermilk mustache. Miss Titus’s was real.

  “He’s the smartest kid in our grade,” I said, which was true.

  Miss Titus stood up to cut three slices out of the cake. It was layer.

  “Where’s mine?”

  A terrible voice came out of nowhere, or the grave.

  “I said where’s mine?”

  Scooter froze. Every hair on my head stood up. If I’d had hair anywhere else, it would have stood up too. That voice was scarier than the gunfire, and where had it come from?

  “All right, Mama!” Miss Titus pushed back from the table.

  Mama? Miss Titus was the oldest woman in the United States. And she had a mama? Scooter smacked his forehead.

  Miss Titus pushed a door open. Looking back at us, she said, “You think I’m mean.”

  We fidgeted. From the other room a voice like a crow cawing said, “Is it store-bought cake or homemade? Because I like store-bought.”

  Miss Titus sighed.

  “Who’s out there?” the voice demanded.

  “Two owlhoots I cornered in the barn, Mama.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They say they’re collecting milkweed, but I think they’re trying to steal Papa’s automobile.” Miss Titus looked back at us over her spectacles.

  “Milkweed’s a weed,” came the aged voice, “and the auto’s junk. Send them in here.”

  Oh no. Hadn’t we been punished enough? Miss Titus pointed at us. We stumbled over and peered around the door. The other room was mostly bed, with a black-walnut headboard to the ceiling.

  In that bed was a woman that time had forgot. She had a face like the Grand Canyon. She was bigger than Miss Titus, and somewhat balder.

  She peered. “But they’s little varmints.”

  Scooter sighed.

  Miss Titus gave us a pair of pushes, and we were by the bed. The old lady leaned over to take a better gander at us. Strange smells wafted out of the bed. We were close enough to see all the craters in her nose.

  “Guess how old I am.”

  We couldn’t.

  “I’m ninety-seven years old. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  We just stood there.

  “When you’re old enough,” she said, “are you going to fight for your country?”

  We guessed so, we said, if the war lasted that long.

  “What about your daddies?” Her old hand came up to stroke several moles and small chin growths.

  “My dad fought in the last war,” I said.


  Silence. Then Scooter said, “My dad’s in it. Shipping out from San Diego.”

  So he got it said finally. But it took this.

  “We’re waitin’ on my brother,” Miss Titus’s mama said, turning her face to the wallpaper curling down the wall. “He writes and says when he gets back home he’s goin’ to furl his flags and forget about killin’. And the army ain’t gettin’ him back. They’d have to burn the woods and sift the ashes to find him. He plans to melt down his medals and throw his uniform on the fire.”

  Like my dad. He wouldn’t even wear a brown suit, after all these years.

  “And I ain’t forgot about the cake,” she said over our heads to Miss Titus.

  That was it. We could go then. Miss Titus said she was going to see us off the property, to make sure. And just so we knew, next time she’d aim lower. She’d put a new part in our haircuts. Out on the porch I had to ask her. “Your mama’s brother. Is he a lot . . . younger?”

  “No, he was older,” Miss Titus said. “He was with General Logan’s 31st Illinois Volunteers. The Civil War, of course. She’s worn his letters out, but she’s waiting on him to come home now. It keeps her going.”

  From the porch she watched us off the place. The track down to the county road was one rock after another, so we walked our bikes. Then we were pedaling back toward town, the milkweed escaping out of our sacks, silky into the August afternoon.

  “I don’t know,” Scooter said. “Maybe we’re giving too much to the war effort.”

  He had a point. I kept pedaling. “But it was a swell old automobile.”

  “Way too historic for scrap,” said Scooter.

  We pedaled across Wyckles Corner without looking both ways. “The trouble with this war,” Scooter said, “is the only people left at home are old as the hills and cranky as Old Nick.”

  My dad wasn’t cranky as Old Nick, but how could I say so when his dad was gone? “The cake was good, though,” I said, which Scooter agreed to.

  A Teacher Shortage . . .

  . . . raised our hopes, but this year school started on time. Our teacher was Miss Landis, and it looked like her first year on the job. She painted her legs light brown and drew a dark line up the backs for the seam because ladies’ stockings had gone to war. Thirty-six pairs of nylons made a parachute, according to Scooter.

  There was a diamond ring on Miss Landis’s finger, and her soldier was overseas. Scooter put a pin in England to show her where. Though she was shaky on long division, he gave her some pointers. She was real pretty, which helped her with the boys and hurt her with the girls. Especially three of them.

  In October Scooter pinned Guadalcanal as the war seemed to stall. The tide wasn’t turning now. Bill was in flight school, writing from Bruce Field, Texas. He was practicing touch-and-go landings, and he’d be soloing pretty soon, before winter. War edged a little closer. Then it broke out in our classroom.

  Miss Landis mentioned that she was going to inspect the state of our hands and nails starting tomorrow after the Pledge. Her hands and nails were nice. In fact, her manicure was better than her math.

  Tomorrow came, and hands spread on desks as she started up and down the aisles. As luck would have it, Beverly C. sat across from me. There hulked big Beverly with her uncombed hair standing out like something gone to seed. People said you could see things moving in Beverly’s scalp. I never looked.

  As Miss Landis approached, Beverly made two big fists. Miss Landis hovered and made the mistake of tapping one of Beverly’s big knuckles with a perfect fingertip.

  “Lady, don’t think about touchin’ me,” Beverly rumbled back in her throat. But she opened her fists just to show Miss Landis what she thought of the inspection. Her hands looked like she’d been stripping down an outboard motor and changing the oil on a truck. Her nails were chewed down to the half-moons.

  Miss Landis started. “Oh dear,” she said. “Beverly, honey, do you own a file or . . . soap?”

  “What I got’s my bidness,” Beverly muttered. “Keep movin’ while you got the chance.”

  That was the first skirmish. The war heated up from there.

  Miss Landis wasn’t great on grammar, though we did a lot of it. “Scooter Tomlinson,” she sang out one day, “can you give me an example of an adverb?”

  “Gladly,” Scooter said.

  But she didn’t get it.

  We put in hours up at the blackboard on grammar, four or five of us at a time, diagramming sentences. I never saw the reason behind this.

  Scooter was diagramming next to me one time when he muttered, “Don’t look now, but your participle’s dangling.” I looked down before I thought. Scooter was beginning to have a somewhat smart mouth, but we were older now.

  When Miss Landis called Beverly to the board, Big Bev just pointed across the room and snapped her gnawed fingers at her stooge Doreen R. Doreen did Beverly’s bidding and all her dirty work and heavy lifting.

  “No, Doreen,” Miss Landis said, flustered. “You, Beverly.”

  “I’m busy.” Beverly lolled at her desk, snapping a rubber band. The classroom box of rubber bands had vanished from the teacher’s desk, and they were the last for the duration.

  Around this time, Miss Landis’s purse disappeared. Janis W., Beverly’s other full-time stooge, was wearing lipstick now, which wasn’t allowed. Some of the girls said it was Miss Landis’s shade. Jungle Dawn Pink, according to them.

  In Miss Landis’s missing purse was always a small blue bottle of Evening in Paris perfume, which she dotted on her wrists at recess. Doreen was wearing perfume, a load of it. She smelled like she’d dumped a full bottle of Evening in Paris over her head. It cut your eyes three rows away.

  “P.U.,” said a couple of girls too near Doreen. Later that same day they had bad falls in the school yard.

  We waited for Miss Landis to take charge of the classroom, but she was pretty near tears most of the time. Then one fatal War Stamp Thursday came.

  We brought our dimes and our stamp books up to the teacher’s desk by rows. I had a dime extra reserved to pay off Doreen, who was collecting for Beverly that week. Then trouble broke out in Doreen’s row.

  Patty MacIntosh, a small, skinny girl, was pleading for her life. “But I only have a nickel left. I forgot.” Doreen flipped the nickel in Patty’s face. Then Doreen was out of her seat, and Patty’s bird-brittle arm was being twisted behind her back, and she was shrieking. Miss Landis started. Pink stamps went all over.

  “To the principal’s office,” Miss Landis said to Doreen, who’d turned Patty loose. This brought Beverly heaving out of her seat and snapping a finger at Janis. They all three stalked out the door.

  “Not you, Beverly,” Miss Landis said in a hopeless voice. “Not you, Janis . . .”

  They didn’t go to the principal’s office either. But did we care? We last stamp buyers didn’t have to pay the extra dime of protection money. Then just when the day was finally about over, we heard a siren.

  Some people started to get under their desks. But the door banged back, and in strutted Beverly, Doreen, and Janis, looking really pleased with themselves. Beverly was as close to a grin as she ever got. Behind them came a cop, in uniform. G. K. Ingersoll, according to his badge. He was the real thing with a nightstick and a cartridge belt. It was kind of neat, and we stared.

  Miss Landis hung at the front of the classroom, one hand slipping off the chalk tray.

  “Miss,” G. K. Ingersoll said, “are these yours?”

  They’d been nabbed shoplifting at the Ben Franklin store. Sadly, the manager wasn’t pressing charges. But Beverly and her stooges got most of a day off out of it and a ride in a police car, with siren.

  The bell rang, and we went home. Beverly’s bunch made a U-turn and left with us.

  Miss Landis got through most of the next morning by not calling on any of the three of them. Then once again we got a visitor.

  A giant figure appeared at the classroom door. We hadn’t seen a woman this big since Mr
s. Meece came for her girdle. She strode in, shoulders first, wearing overalls and a red bandanna wrapped around her head. And great big hobnail boots.

  The war poster on the wall showed an assembly line of women riveters under a headline:

  WE’RE THE JANES WHO BUILD THE PLANES

  This woman looked just like them, but more than life-size. We knew who she was. She was an even beefier Beverly. It was her mom. Had to be.

  She scanned the rows for Beverly, who hardly flinched. Then Beverly’s mom was at the front of the room with a finger in Miss Landis’s face. “You. You the teacher?”

  Miss Landis said she was, faintly.

  “I’m on a cigarette break from the plant,” Beverly’s mom barked. “But the next time they nail her at Ben Franklin or wherever, I’ll be docked a day’s pay, bailing her out.” She jerked a thumb back at Beverly, who was over the surprise of seeing her mom at school. She was close to a grin again.

  Miss Landis whimpered.

  “Do your job,” Beverly’s mom snapped. “I know she’s no picnic, but KEEP THAT BRAT OFF THE STREETS WHILE I’M AT WORK.”

  You could have heard her all over the school. The principal did. As Beverly’s mom barged out, Miss Howe was coming in. They jammed. Then Beverly’s mom was gone, and Miss Howe was in the room, gazing across us at Miss Landis.

  She’d slumped into her chair. Her head hung. We couldn’t see her perfect hands, helpless in her lap.

  She looked up at Miss Howe. “I can’t do this,” Miss Landis said.

  We had a weekend to wonder.

  “She’ll be back,” Scooter predicted. “It’s nearly November. Where are they going to find anybody else? There’s a war on.”

  But on Monday morning Miss Landis wasn’t there. She hadn’t even had to clean out her desk. Beverly and her stooges had done that for her weeks ago. We milled around and threw chalk until Miss Howe herself loomed into the room.

  “People,” she said, “Miss Landis has made the difficult decision to take up a position in war work, as so many teachers are doing these days.”