A Year Down Yonder

by Richard Peck

  The all-school party was that night, a hayride and a wienie roast out on the Bowman farm. There weren’t enough boys for a prom, and the Baptists and the Methodists didn’t dance.

  We could fit the whole school on a hayframe, pulled by two mules. Some of us were too shy for a party. The Johnson brothers didn’t show up. Then that evening turned out to be a greater disaster than the tornado, if you were Carleen Lovejoy.

  On the hayride home Royce and I sat together on the hayframe, back by the lantern, dangling our feet. I don’t know how it happened. Call it fate.

  “How’s things at your house?” Royce hazarded, though he still wasn’t much for small talk.

  “Don’t rub it in,” I said.

  “No, I think your grandma’s a real interesting person,” he said, and our hands brushed. “Everybody—”

  “Royce, we’re lucky she’s not here on this hayframe with us. You must have noticed she rarely misses a party. But let’s leave her out of this if we can. The moon’s out, and Carleen’s in a snit because we’re sitting together. Let’s just enjoy ourselves and have a hayride.”

  “Are you bossy?” he inquired, lantern light woven into his knitted brows.

  “Who, me?” I said. “Maybe a little.”

  “What would happen if I wrote to you from the U. of I.?”

  “I’d faint and fall over from surprise,” I said, though somehow his arm had found its way around my shoulder. “There are lots of girls at the U. of I. It’s a coeducational institution.”

  “But what would you do if I did?” he said. “Write, I mean.

  “I’d write back,” I said. And Ina-Rae, buried in the hay behind us but near enough I could feel her breath on my ear, told Carleen all about it.

  When I came in that night with straw in my hair, I knew it was time for a showdown with Grandma. She was in the front room, pretending to be asleep in the platform rocker. As a rule, she had to wake herself up to go to bed. But she was sitting up for me, awake behind her eyelids.

  “What?” she said, stirring when I stepped up beside her.

  “Grandma, I’ve been thinking.”

  “You should have tried that in math class,” she observed.

  “Grandma, I don’t want to go back to Chicago. I want to stay here with you.”

  She knew, of course. Dad was working now. They’d found an apartment up in Rogers Park. Mother was fixing up the second bedroom for me. They wanted me home as soon as school was out. It was all in the letter.

  I wanted to explain to Grandma how she needed me here. I’d fuss about her if I wasn’t here to see how she was. But she’d just spent days working herself into the ground to prove I was only in her way. She’d been helping me leave for a week.

  “I need your bed,” she said. “I’m thinking about running this place as a rooming house. I miss the rent off that little New York feller.”

  “Grandma.”

  “Might cook for them and bring in a little extry that way.” She was looking aside, out the bay into the dark.

  “Grandma, was I too much trouble?”

  That went too far. But I was her granddaughter, and she’d taught me everything I knew, and I liked to win.

  Her hand came up to her mouth. That big old workscarred hand with Grandpa Dowdel’s gold band embedded in it.

  “What would your paw think if I kept you?” she said finally. “I don’t want your maw after me.”

  “Grandma, Mother’s terrified of you. She always was. You know that.”

  “Me?” Grandma was the picture of surprise. “She’s from Chicago. I’m nothin’ but an old country gal.”

  She could look at me again now, though her eyes were pink and glistening. “You take the kitten. I’ll keep the cat,” she said. “You go on home to your folks. It’ll be all right. I don’t lock my doors.”

  That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.

  Ever After

  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.

  About the Author

  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.