Aim (24 page)

Leroy took off his straw hat and slapped it against the porch post. Then he plopped it on Ann Fay's head. She grinned and pulled it down over her ears.

“What you got there, Junior?” asked Leroy.

“Well, sir, it's not a cat. And it's not a cow. So it must be a dog.”

“Can we keep him, Daddy? Puhleaze.” Ann Fay tugged on Leroy's arm.

The girl could learn a thing or two about giving a man a little peace and quiet. I wanted to tell her to hush and leave him alone or she'd ruin the whole thing.

Leroy frowned. “I don't need another mouth to feed.”

“Poor stray needs a family,” I said. “And we have two dogs already.”

“Here, Junior. Let me hold him.” Ann Fay didn't wait for me to hand him over. Just took him right out of my arms. But the first thing he did was leap onto the porch and run off. When he came to the crazy quilt he stopped and sniffed all around Bobby. Then he licked his fist.

Myrtle frowned and started to reach for her baby boy, but the dog curled right up next to him like somehow that young'un would protect him.

“Daddy, look,” said Ann Fay. “He likes the baby. Poor little puppy needs someone to love. We'll take good care of him, Daddy. He'll make me real happy, Daddy.”

Leroy sighed and shook his head. He looked at Ann
Fay and I saw a little grin growing on his face. “Junior Bledsoe, what have you done to me?”

I knew then that he was giving in.

Ann Fay grabbed my elbow. “What's his name?”

I shrugged her off. “Like I said, I found him by the side of the road. He didn't come with a sign announcing his name, for Pete's sake.”

“Pete!” yelled Ida. “We'll call him Pete.”

Seemed like everybody else in the family just stood there nodding.

Pete was all snuggled up against that baby boy, and now he had his head on the child's belly. When Bobby breathed, it was like he was rocking that little dog's head. Up and down. Up and down.

Leroy started to draw water from the well and Myrtle fetched cups from the kitchen and we sat on the edge of the porch and in the grass and drank clean, cold water. I told them about Aunt Lily dropping the dipper into the well and how Pop took a licking for it.

“That's not fair!” said Ann Fay.

“Sounds like he took a lot of whuppings he didn't deserve,” I said.

I thought how it was going on a year since my pop had died. An awful lot had happened since then. The Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor and now we were at war.

If the war went on long enough, Leroy Honeycutt still might have to go off to fight.

I sure hoped not. If it wasn't for him and a few others,
even Miss Pauline, I'd probably still be stumbling around making a mess of myself.

One thing for sure, if Leroy did get drafted, I aimed to help look after Ann Fay and the rest of the family—just the way he'd always looked after me.

Nobody could take the place of their daddy. I knew that as well as anybody. But I could help with the garden and fix just about anything that broke. And I'd do my level best to be as steady and upstanding as the porch post I was leaning against right that minute.

        
Maybe me and Pop don't go together like biscuits and gravy

        
the way Ann Fay and Leroy do.

        
But according to Granddaddy

        
the acorn didn't fall far from the tree.

        
I reckon I do have some of Pop's ways about me,

        
and he had some good ones, for sure—

        
how he loved my momma

        
and the way he got along with his neighbors, real good.

        
He had a heart as big as Bakers Mountain

        
And a knack for fixing whatever broke—

        
not for money, but just for the love of doing it.

        
Those are the things I'm aiming for.

        
And when I feel like I'm up in the air on a scary bridge

        
I'll hang on to his words.

        
Don't look down
.

        
Keep your eye on where you're going
.

        
You'll get across just fine
.

When my publisher asked me to consider writing a prequel to
Blue
, I knew immediately that Junior Bledsoe would be the protagonist. Junior is one of my favorite characters from
Blue
and its sequel,
Comfort
. I love his neighborliness and the never-ending support he gave to Ann Fay Honeycutt during her family's hard times.

But I knew he hadn't always been so mature and that he had probably been shaped by his own difficulties. So I took a seed from
Blue
in which Ann Fay says, “Junior is seventeen years old. He's the man of his house too, ever since his daddy's heart give out a few years ago.” From those lines grew a story about what had happened to Junior's father and how Junior responded to the challenges of losing him.

When I wrote
Blue
I had no idea of the dysfunction in Junior's family. But I've witnessed family dysfunction and wanted to explore the conflicting feelings that children experience in families that don't run smoothly.

It wasn't until Junior played hooky from school that I realized the mill town of Brookford would become a part of the story. As a child, I rode through Brookford on my way to Hickory and was always intrigued with the hills
covered in tiny white houses, the mill, the dam, and the swinging bridge.

Brookford Mills was in operation from 1898 until the late 1950s. Farmers in neighboring communities grew cotton to supply the mill, and individuals like Junior helped pick it. In fact, local schools planned their schedules so that students would be free during cotton-picking season in September.

Most of the characters in
Aim
are fictional. Some, however, were real. Jerm Foster was a Brookford resident with a reputation for being an upstanding citizen and a fine mechanic. Stewart Elrod ran the Brookford Service Station. Garland Abernethy was a farmer who lived in Junior's neighborhood.

Joe DiMaggio played baseball for the New York Yankees, and between May and July of 1941 he enjoyed the longest hitting streak in baseball history—fifty-six games. At a time when Americans were anxious about going to war, he served as an inspiration and a call to greatness. In the early 1940s, most major league baseball games were played during the day and recreated via telegrams for broadcasting on the radio.

Sergeant Alvin C. York was also a real person. His finely honed hunting skills gave him near-perfect aim. During World War I, in a battle in France, York used his
sharpshooting skills to defeat the enemy, leading eight other Americans in capturing 132 German soldiers. For several decades York rejected offers to make his story into a motion picture. By the outbreak of World War II, however, he believed that such a movie could help protect innocent people from greedy dictators. Beginning in the summer of 1941,
Sergeant York
played in theaters nationwide, spurring patriotism and support for the war. York's photograph appeared several times in the
Hickory Daily Record
and in other publications across the country as part of the propaganda campaign to persuade Americans to get behind the war.

By 1941, Germany, Italy, and Japan had allied themselves in their various military campaigns against innocent people. Americans who read the news were divided about whether to step in and help. Some felt the problems in Europe, Africa, and Asia belonged to the people who lived in those places and that we should stay out of the war altogether. Others were in favor of sending military equipment, but not our men, to the battlefield. On December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, public opinion immediately shifted. Americans now believed that the “Axis powers”—Japan, Italy, and Germany—were determined to eventually conquer North America.

Americans would not sit by and allow such a thing to happen. Citizens across the nation began to support the war effort, conserving resources, recycling items that could be used to produce armaments, buying war bonds, enlisting in the armed forces, and much more. As America's men went off to war, women took their places in jobs they would never have imagined. In addition to doing factory work and using heavy equipment, they built airplanes, battleships, and weapons. Many assisted the war effort on the battlefront, serving as army nurses and flying airplanes on non-combat missions.

World War II profoundly changed America. It produced a powerful sense of patriotism, rearranged attitudes toward women and racial minorities, and gave the average American a much greater sense of belonging to a world community.

The Home Front: USA World War II
, by Ronald H. Bailey (Time Life Books, 1977)

My War: From Bismarck to Britain and Back
, by Ruth Register Coleman. (Trafford Publishing, 2006)

Yesterday's Child: Growing Up in a Mill Town during the Great Depression
, by Dorothy Sigmon Holbrook (Catawba County Historical Association, 1998)

Brookford Memories
, by Dyke Little (Watermark, 2010)

America at War, 1941–1945: The Home Front
, by Clark G. Reynolds (Gallery Books, 1990)

Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary
, by Tom Skeyhill (Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928)

America Goes to War: The Homefront WWII
, by Eric Sevareid. Washington, DC: PBS, Anthony Potter Productions, 1990.

Sergeant York
, by Howard Hawks. Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Pictures, 2006.

The War
, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Washington, DC: PBS, 2007.

baseball-almanac.com/
(Baseball Almanac)

joedimaggio.com/
(Joe DiMaggio's official website)

acacia.pair.com/Acacia.Vignettes/The.Diary.of.Alvin.York.html
(
The Diary of Alvin York)

docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/091141.html
(Fireside Chat 110, September 11, 1941, “On Maintaining Freedom of the Seas”—President Roosevelt's address to the nation after the USS
Greer
exchanged fire with a German U-boat)

docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/tmirhdee.html
(December 8, 1941, President Roosevelt asks Congress for a Declaration of War)

docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/120941.html
(Fireside Chat 140, December 9, 1941—President Roosevelt's address to the nation after Congress declares war on Japan)

*
Websites current at time of publication

Counting on Grace
, by Elizabeth Winthrop (Wendy Lamb, 2006)

Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows
, by Barry Denenberg (Scholastic, 2001)

Flygirl
, by Sherri L. Smith (G.P. Putnam Sons Books for Young Readers, 2009)

Joe DiMaggio: Young Sports Hero
, by Herb Dunn (Aladdin, 1999)

Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade against Child Labor
, by Russell Freedman and Lewis Wickes Hine (Clarion, 1994)

Lyddie
, by Katherine Paterson (Lodestar, 1991)
Mare's War
, by Tanita Davis (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2009)

My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck
, by Mary Pope Osborne (Scholastic, 2000)

Sergeant York
, by John Perry (Thomas Nelson, 2010)

The Streak
, by Barb Rosenstock (Calkins Creek Books, 2014)

The World Wars
, by Paul Dowswell, Ruth Brocklehurst, and Henry Brook (Usborne Books, 2007)

World War II: Fighting for Freedom: The Story of the Conflict That Changed the World, 1934–1945
, by Peter Chrisp (Scholastic, 2010)

I'm grateful to Carolyn Yoder who, more than a decade ago, suggested I research a story in my own backyard. That challenge led to the writing of
Blue
, which led to
Comfort
. Eventually, the publisher, Boyds Mills Press/ Calkins Creek Books, asked for a prequel.
Aim
was born.

Thank you to Larry Mosteller and Ken Moyer for ensuring that my car scenes were accurate, to Andy and Naomi Bivens and Donna Ward for sharing their expertise concerning work in a cotton mill, to Rebecca Huffman for information about Mountain View High School in the 1940s, and to Robin Shelton, Pearl Davis, and Dyke Little for reflections on life in Brookford.

Thank you to Joanne Hunsberger for proofreading and Katya Rice for copyedits and to each person at Boyds Mills Press who helped to bring
Aim
to publication.

Kudos to my beta readers, Shannon Hitchcock, Wendy Hostetter Davis, Chuck Hostetter, Kay Mosteller, Gail and Abby Hickok, Mel Hager, Carol Baldwin, Judge Avery, and also to my writer friend Rebecka. I love that each of you read
Aim
while it was rough around the edges and helped me point it in the right direction.