Free On The Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck Page A

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.
    â€œHe’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

Spring Took Its Sweet Time Coming . . .
    . . . 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.
    â€œOld Lady Graves?” Scooter said.
    â€œYou knock,” I said.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œPaper,” Scooter said. “When we turn in a thousand pounds apiece, we get General Eisenhower’s medal.”
    â€œDo tell,” she said. “Start with the basement.”
    It was real dank, though she’d kept every paper ever delivered to