Selected Backlist
Amanda/Miranda
Are You in the House Alone?
Don't Look and It Won't Hurt
Dreamland Lake
The Ghost Belonged to Me
Fair Weather
The Last Safe Place on Earth
A Long Way from Chicago
Remembering the Good Times
Secrets of the Shopping Mall
Strays like Us
A Year Down Yonder
Excerpt from The River Between
Us
Chapter One
To me, the best part was that we'd make the trip by
car. When I say car, I mean a Ford, of course, a Model
T touring car, and they don't make them like that anymore.
In those days it was a big thing to drive a car out
of town, let alone a hundred miles each way of Southern
Illinois dirt road. I thought the journey itself was
going to be the adventure.
My dad made house calls in the Ford. He was a very
well-thought-of doctor in the St. Louis of that time.
A tall man with black curly hair parted in the middle
and steel-rimmed spectacles gripping the bridge of his
nose. He wore high celluloid collars, and I never saw
him without a necktie.
I thought he carried all the wisdom of the world in
the black bag that traveled to house calls with him
on the front seat of the Ford. With the same silent
skill that he used to set a bone, he could patch a tire.
Apparently, my dad had been young once, but I couldn't
picture it. Even at the age of fifteen I knew but little
about who he was and where he'd come from. And so I
knew but little about myself.
My dad was what they called a self-made man. Though
he'd succeeded in St. Louis, he'd come from a little
town called Grand Tower on the other side of the Mississippi
River down low in Illinois.
All I knew of Dad's people was that they'd lived through
the Civil War. Imagine an age when there were still
people around who'd seen U. S. Grant with their own
eyes, and men who'd voted for Lincoln. People you could
reach out and touch.
My dad's father, the first Dr. William Hutchings, had
been a doctor in the Union Army. My grandmother and
grandfather Hutchings still lived in what Dad called
the homeplace, down in Grand Tower, that wide spot in
the road.
I couldn't remember visiting them before. My mother
was very standoffish about my dad's side of the family.
She was a St. Louis girl, and we boys were named for
her side of the family. I was Howard Leland Hutchings.
My little brothers, twins, were Raymond and Earl. At
the age of five, they were too young to figure much
in this story, but they came along on the trip too.
Dad worked a six-and-a-half-day week. It was a great
occasion when he found an afternoon to take me to a
Browns game. That was before the Browns forsook St.
Louis to be the Baltimore Orioles.
But now he had announced that we were going to visit
his folks-motoring there and back in the Ford. It was
the summer of 1916, and war was raging across Europe,
the Great War. Dad said it was just a question of time
before America got in it. In wartime there'd be restrictions
on travel, and so it was now or never.
The next thing I remember is the morning we left, like
the dawn of creation. It was a July day breathless with
St. Louis heat and the thrill of the open road unwinding
before us. Our preparations had taken days. We'd filled
as many cans of gasoline as we could strap to the running
boards. Dad had personally filed down the points on
the spark plugs. I hadn't slept a wink in two nights,
and now the moment of leaving was upon us.
Mother wasn't going and didn't want us to go. And I
didn't know why. I remember her up on the porch and
the Ford there in the middle of Maryland Avenue. Dad
and I wore dusters and caps with goggles. One of the
extra features of our Ford was a windshield. But it
was always laid flat across the hood for city driving.
The Ford was a touring car, which meant it had a canvas
pull-up roof in case of rain, or for when you spent
a night on the road.
You had to crank the car a good ten minutes to get
it going, and Dad left that part to me. The knack for
starting a Ford was to jack up a rear wheel. He got
the little boys settled on the rear seat, but they kept
spilling out of the car, running back to the house for
something they'd forgotten. I wondered if we'd ever
get away.
But at last the engine caught and turned over. The
Ford coughed twice and came to life. Dad broke a fresh
egg into the radiator so that it would hard-boil and
seal the leaks. The boys were more or less settled.
Dad let out the brake and fiddled with the gas lever.
We'd already roused the neighborhood. Now we were off
in a volley of sharp reports from the tailpipe. And
Mother was turning back to the house.
I ought to have kept a journal of the trip, but that's
not the way of a fifteen-year-old boy. I remember we
were hardly over the Illinois side before Earl learned
he was subject to car sickness and Raymond was hit with
a great wave of homesickness. Dad had something in his
black bag for Earl. He cured Raymond by saying it wasn't
too late to take him back home and leave him behind.
