The Avion My Uncle Flew (2 page)

On the way back home from Salt Lake City I asked my mother how soon I could begin to walk around like anyone else did without having all the hurt and pains in my hip and if she thought maybe by this summer I could ride a bicycle.

I said, “How much longer have I got to use crutches? I can't do anything with crutches. I don't like crutches.”

Mother said, “I don't know if you can ride a bike this summer. Dr. Watkins gave me the name of a man in Chicago and another man in New York. Both of them are supposed to be very wonderful. You don't exactly have to have an operation. They have to twist the bone just right and I'm afraid it will be rather painful and after that you have to be very brave and make yourself walk without crutches, even if it does hurt—” And then she sort of stopped and looked quick out of the window and I heard her say, as if mostly she was talking to herself, “Oh, Johnny, if your father were only here.”

Old Jake Tolliver, the foreman, met us at the train with the ranch truck. He carried me down, crutches and all, like I was a baby. He must have noticed something in my mother's face because he didn't ask her any questions at all on the way home.

For the next couple of weeks it was pretty bad. Most of the time I stayed in my room, going over my coin collection or reading—or not doing anything at all. I told my mother I wasn't going to see any bone-twisting doctors. I'm afraid I didn't give her much peace. The fact is, if you want to know, I was plain scared. My mother was gentle, and no one could have been any kinder than she was. Because my father was in the service, mother learned she had the right to take me to an army hospital. Mr. Collins—who was Bob's father, and an old friend of my father, and sort of looked out for us while my father was away—well, he said that it would save expense if we could find someone just as good as the men the Salt Lake City doctor had recommended. Mr. Collins got busy. He wrote letters. He sent telegrams. He found the Chicago man was almost the best bone specialist in the country. But the man wasn't in Chicago any more; he was a major, and in the medical corps; he was located at the Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. The very best bone specialist in the country was off somewhere else, over in Europe with the army, so even if we'd have wanted to go to him in New York we couldn't.

It was all fixed, then, for my mother to take me to San Francisco. Meanwhile, they'd been cabling to my father in France. They'd cabled him about me, so he wouldn't be concerned when he learned we'd left the ranch—and they cabled him about an idea Mr. Collins had which was to combine the ranches and form a business, with a place for my father as one of the heads of the outfit just as soon as he was released from the army.

But we didn't get any news back from my father.…

Mother cabled again. So did Mr. Collins. They waited a week—and no reply came. They couldn't understand that. Mother delayed our trip. They got worried. They knew the war in Europe was ended but they had read in the newspapers how the Germans were still causing trouble with what is called gorilla fighting. Mother, I suspect, was afraid something might have happened to father.

Time stretched out three days—four days—a week. Mr. Collins again drove over. He said maybe he ought to take it up with the War Department; he couldn't understand it. While he was talking, with mother just sitting there, her face awful pale, we heard thunder from up in the sky.

I can tell you, we don't have much thunder in Wyoming. When we do have it, we don't have it usually in late spring. That thunder rose up big and huge—and then we knew it wasn't thunder. It was a low flying airplane. Mr. Collins said maybe one of the big transports had lost its way and he ran out of the house and mother went to the window and I grabbed on to my crutches and limped for the door.

With a kind of whish and roar to it the thunder went right over our house. Next minute somebody was shooting off revolvers outside. My mother rushed out of the house. Old Jake was yelling. I got as far as the door and accidentally slipped on the rug, the crutches plopping out from under me on each side. I crawled over to get one of the crutches. Then I was crawling over to the other side of the room to get the other crutch. There I was on my hands and knees, like I was still a year old and didn't know how to walk, when the door opened.

My father walked in. My mother was holding his arm. Her eyes were glistening. He'd flown straight from Washington in an army plane going on to Salt Lake City. The pilot who was flying the plane was a friend of my father and had circled our ranch and come down behind the barn where the meadow is straight and even clear to the crick; and afterwards he took off again for Salt Lake City.

“Hi, Johnny,” said my father, looking down at me. He seemed bigger than I remembered him to be, lots thinner. His hair was gray around the sides. There was a big ugly red scar he never used to have down from his cheek to his chin, nearly. But his eyes were just as laughing as ever. His voice had that same funny deep sound in it I used to remember it had when he'd come up and hint around that we might take a Saturday off to go fishing or for a tramp up into the montagnes.

I was so excited seeing him that I clean forgot about my leg.

I got about halfway to him and my mother, too, when it was like having someone open a trapdoor underneath me. Probably I'd have gone on down clear to China if my father hadn't given a jump. He grabbed me. He picked me up and carried me to the sofa and laid me down there.

I guess I have to stop now. Tomorrow night I'll write some more. I'll tell you why my father hadn't answered our cables and why he'd come back for only a short time; and what he decided to do, after listening to my mother, and hearing what Mr. Collins proposed to do with the ranches. And, oh, yes, I'll explain what Dr. Medley said about my leg.

2

THE MAN WITH THE CROOKED BEARD

On Saturday I heard the news.

We were going to France! All of us. My mother and my father—and me. It was like falling off a horse again to hear such a thing as that. Falling off a horse? A house. A whole skyscraper.

You see it happened this way: Almost a year ago, my father had been pretty badly hurt when a German shell exploded near him. He'd written us he'd been in the hospital but we never realized it had been anything very serious. He'd almost lost an eye and he would carry that scar on his face the rest of his life.

After he recovered, he wasn't strong enough to go back to his outfit—and I guess, not being able to rejoin his men nearly killed him. But anyway, after he was released from the hospital he was transferred from his outfit to Paris. He had to work on what he called “liaison”—which is a French word, I think—helping our army staff in Paris tie in their plans and actions with the British and French. My mother's family name was Langres. Her mother and father had died when she was a little older than I am now. She'd come over here to live with an uncle in New York, who was an importer, and go to school; but her brother had been too young for any traveling, only a baby then, so he'd stayed in France to be brought up by friends of the Langres.

I'd never seen my oncle—as the French call it—Paul; but by now he was about twenty. This may seem like a roundabout way of explaining something but it isn't. Even though my oncle Paul was only fifteen or sixteen when the Germans took over France, he had managed to escape from the pre-engineering school he was attending in Paris and run away to the montagnes and join other Frenchmen who kept on fighting. Toward the end of the war, my father told me, my oncle Paul had done some flying, even.

Well, when my father went to Paris, he ran into Paul who had been hurt and had been in a French hospital and now was out, acting as a French liaison officer between the French command and the Americans.

Although my oncle Paul was the only man remaining of the Langres family, he had important friends in the French army, who had been friends with my mother's father—that is, my French grandfather who'd been a colonel, too, only in the last war. In addition my oncle Paul knew how to speak the English language that people like me and my father and my mother and everyone else I knew spoke before I was taken over to France. He introduced my father to his friends.

As a result, I gather my father found he had a whole barrel of new friends in Paris. Some of them were pretty high up. Consequently, when the American army heard about that, they said that was helpful. They kept him on his new job. They never did let him go into Germany with his outfit. After the Germans quit they asked him to keep on, and help clean up all the details that follow any war. They gave him a furlough of one month to return home; and the reason he hadn't ever replied to our cables was, first, he planned to surprise us; and second, when mother's and Mr. Collins' last cables were sent, he was on the way to us.

He told my mother he was expected to stay in France for at least another year. You can guess that news made my mother pretty sad. But he told her he had more news for her: With the war ended now for nearly a half year, ships and airplanes were beginning to take regular passengers back and forth, between our country and Europe. He said he'd talked with Washington, D.C. There wasn't any objection if mother and I bought tickets and went over to Europe and took a house in Paris and lived there to be with him.

Another thing, he said, when he'd learned about my leg, he'd discussed it with the army doctors over there. There was a colonel named Colonel Melvon, in the medical corps, in Paris. Father knew him. And, father said, this Colonel Melvon was supposed to be the greatest expert on bone surgery and bone troubles we had. At that, my mother started smiling. This was the same doctor that the doctor in Salt Lake City had said I should see in New York. So before coming back, my father had talked with Colonel Melvon and arranged for him to look at my leg and see what was wrong providing my mother and I came to France.

And that was the news.…

You never saw such a stirring in all your life. Of course, my mother had known we were going for nearly a week. My father had arranged with Mr. Collins about the ranch. Everything was attended to. On Sunday we even had a big dinner with half the county there, I guess. But all that time I'd been doing a power of thinking.

One thing, until my father returned and I knew we were going on the trip, I hadn't ever thought of my mother as being French.

Sometimes when I'd see her out of my window, watching her swinging along toward the barn or toward the corral, holding my father's hand, it was almost like seeing two other people down there and not my own father and mother. I can't exactly explain. They'd be laughing and talking away, sometimes in this new funny language they had together; and, it was as if somehow they were a couple of kids not so much older than I was, and they were all interested and wrapped up in themselves and their own plans, and they forgot they had me, too, that I belonged with them. I'm not explaining very well, I know. The fact is, of course, with my father gone away for three years I'd gotten too used to hanging on my mother's apron string. After having that accident with my leg, I was cottoned to and sort of babied. Although I don't like admitting it in writing, I'd not only been spoiled but lost a lot of my gumption.

Anyway, I had the sense of this strangeness. It was coming to me, along with the idea of being uprooted and taken over to France where some fellow over there was going to twist my leg around.

Finally, I told my father I didn't reckon I wanted to go. I told him that the day before we were going to take the train. He didn't say much. He just looked down at me, with that scar red and jagged on the side of his face. He looked down and studied me for a long time, maybe three or four minutes. It sort of scared me. His eyes weren't even laughing. Presently he said something so queer I didn't understand it then—and it was a long time before I did.

He said, “Johnny, did you ever realize a war can cause casualties away from the front line as well as on the front line? That is one of the things so terrible about a war. It can reach out and hit behind the lines where soldiers are fighting. Sometimes it can reach clear back and hit a man's home and hurt the people in his home he loves best. In a way, Johnny, you're a casualty of war, too.”

I said, “Me?” and tried to laugh because I thought he was joking but he wasn't joking. He was quiet and serious. I said, “Thunder. I just fell off my pony. That isn't like being shot at.”

He said, “It's more than just falling off a pony. In the hospital in France I saw men a lot sicker than I hope you'll ever be and they hadn't even been touched by bullets. They'd been wounded but you couldn't see any wounds on them, Johnny. They'd been hurt inside of them, by the war. In a way, something like that has happened to you. We've got to get your leg fixed but that isn't the important thing.” He started smiling. “We've got to get you to want to run on your leg, even if it hurts you to run for a time. We've got to get you to want to see new people and have new experiences instead of depending on your mother and me, and staying shut up in a house and—” He halted a minute. Then he said, “We've got to work out some way for you to go on your own again and not be afraid, just like when you weren't much higher than my knee and you set across the room on your first steps with neither your mother or me holding you, although both of us were scared you'd fall and hurt yourself.”

I said, “I bet if I had a bicycle I could pedal around and—”

He laughed, “Maybe we'll fix it for you to have a bicycle, Johnny, someday, but not right now.”

We took the train Monday with everyone at Piedmont to see us off. I can't tell you how I felt as I saw the montagnes slip away behind us, and all the land and the meadows and the town go off toward the horizon.

We got to New York and stayed at a big hotel. I never saw anything of New York except through the windows of our taxi and through the windows of my room. My father had some army doctors come and look at me. They handled my leg. I don't like to tell how I acted. It's all right to say I was nervous and excited, I suppose, as an excuse—but it was more than that. What I wanted was to be back in my own room on the ranch with my mother bringing up my food and reading to me and feeling sorry for me and making everything easy, or with Bob coming over, and being sympathetic, and letting me have my own way because his father'd told him I was sick.