Yonder Read online

  Dedication

  For Luka,

  who teaches me to be brave

  Epigraph

  The land of our better selves

  is most surely reached by walking.

  —Inscription at Beacon Heights, mile 305.1, Blue Ridge Parkway

  Author Unknown

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Before

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Before

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Before

  Chapter 10

  Before

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Before

  Chapter 13

  Before

  Chapter 14

  Before

  Chapter 15

  Before

  Chapter 16

  Before

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Before

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Before

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Before

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Before

  Chapter 30

  Before

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  One Week Before

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Before

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Historical Notes

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Books by Ali Standish

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Every hero has a story.

  Stories, I’ve learned, are a bit like hearts. We’ve all got one inside us, locked away just out of sight.

  But just because you know there’s a heart beating in the chest of the person standing right beside you doesn’t mean you can hear it. Mostly, you never do.

  Stories are the same way. Told in whispers, as often as not. So you have to listen close to hear them.

  I think you have to listen especially close when it comes to heroes.

  We all want to see heroes. To pat them on the back and shake their hands and tell them what a swell job they’ve done and how thankful we are.

  We want them to be brave, but we don’t want to hear what that bravery has cost them. We don’t want to know that underneath all that bravery is fear, deep and cold as the Watauga River after the first spring thaw. We don’t want to hear their stories. Not their true stories, anyway.

  We’d rather tell stories of our own.

  It was that way when the soldiers went off to war and when they came home. And it was that way with Jack, too.

  The first time I took much notice of Jack Bailey was about the same time lots of folks in Foggy Gap did. It was the summer of 1940, and I was ten years old. It had been raining for three days straight. A hurricane blowing in off the coast had thrown a surprise left hook worthy of a champion prize fighter and come barreling toward Appalachia.

  The rain was still pouring down, and the water was ankle-high in some of the streets as we waded to church on Sunday morning.

  The whole congregation sat soggy and shivering as Pastor Douglass shouted over the storm. He gave an especially heated sermon that morning, like he thought maybe the fire in his voice could drive the damp cold from our pews. It was as he banged his fist against the pulpit to emphasize the power of the Lord’s will that the church groaned and seemed to give a great lurch, like a spooked horse.

  Before Pastor Douglass could say another word, half the congregation was running for the doors to see what was going on. Thankfully, my family’s normal pew was toward the back, which meant I was able to squirm through the adults gathering on the church steps to see what they were staring at.

  The Watauga had burst its banks, and the dirt road that separated the river from the church had now completely disappeared under swiftly flowing water, the color of Daddy’s morning coffee. In fact, half the church steps were already underwater.

  My best friend, Lou, shoved in next to me. “Look, Danny!” she cried out gleefully as she gripped my arm. “There goes Mr. Maynard’s car!”

  Mrs. Maguire quickly clapped a white-gloved hand over Lou’s mouth, but by then the rest of us had already spotted the brand-new Oldsmobile being carried away by the water. From behind me, I heard a man who could have only been Mr. Maynard yell something that certainly had never been uttered on those church steps before. Quick as a flash, Lou’s mother’s hands moved from Lou’s mouth to her ears.

  Then someone else cried out. People began to point to an object floating toward us.

  As it drew closer, I saw it wasn’t one object but two. And then that they weren’t objects at all but two little girls. The Coombs twins, who had stayed home from church that morning on account of having the chicken pox, were floating side by side in the water, flailing and sputtering for breath.

  “They’ll drown!” shouted Mrs. Updike as the twins neared. “Somebody do something!”

  There was a moment’s pause when we all searched ourselves for the courage to jump in, each one of us finding instead an excuse not to.

  Then, from somewhere to my left, I heard a familiar voice—one that never failed to make me flinch.

  “My daddy can do it,” Bruce Pittman crowed. “He’s the best swimmer in town.”

  And with that, all eyes turned from the twins to the Pittmans. Mr. Pittman stood behind Bruce. His face went sallow, his knuckles turning white on his son’s shoulders. His features were pinched like he had just stepped in a steaming pile of horse manure.

  Mr. Pittman’s eyes flickered to the bobbing heads in the swift, churning water. He licked his lips.

  “They’re going under!” squealed Mrs. Maguire as the two tiny heads disappeared beneath the water.

  Mr. Pittman opened his mouth to say something, but we never found out what it was. An elbow jutted into my ribs as people were pushed aside. Then, the flash of someone diving into the water. He was tall but his shoulders narrow. A boy who wasn’t quite yet a man.

  For a long moment, he didn’t reappear, and I thought whoever the boy was, he might have drowned.

  “Who was that?” I heard Mama ask Daddy.

  “I think it’s John Bailey’s boy,” Daddy replied. “Jack, isn’t it?

  The name began to ripple through the crowd. I only knew Jack Bailey from a distance then, as a boy three years ahead of me in school who wore the same ratty clothes every day.

  Behind us all, Pastor Douglass began to pray loudly. “Our Holy Father, maker of heaven and earth—”

  But no one else joined in. We were too busy watching as Jack Bailey suddenly reappeared, hoisting an arm beneath the shoulders of each tiny twin. Then he began to swim toward a river birch that had been felled by the flood (and which was likely w
hat had shaken the church) but whose roots still held fast. If he could get to the tree and lift the girls onto it, they would be able to shimmy along the trunk all the way to where its upper branches rested on dry land.

  At first, it looked like they weren’t going to make it. The current wanted to sweep them forward, not allow them a sideways detour. But then Jack seemed to find some strength he must have been saving up and began to kick, harder and harder, and the people on the steps began to shout.

  “You can do it, son!”

  “Little faster now, that’s it!”

  Then he had reached the birch tree, which gave him enough protection from the current to lift the Coombs twins one at a time onto the trunk. The girls coughed up river water as Jack hoisted himself up after them.

  We watched as he gently pushed them to start scooting their way along the trunk toward dry land.

  By that time, a few men had run through the church’s back door and along the hillside graveyard that still sat above the rising water, where the top of the tree had landed. As soon as the twins were near enough, two of the men reached through the boughs to lift each of them off. Behind them, Jack jumped down.

  The moment they were all on dry land, everyone began to clap and cheer. Some of the women held their handkerchiefs to their noses or eyes, though the handkerchiefs must already have been soaked from the rain. Mr. Maynard looked close to tears, too, though I thought it was more likely he was misty-eyed over his car than out of relief for the twins.

  Only Mr. Pittman looked more unhappy. Bruce, too, was scowling, his cheeks flushed. I elbowed Lou and nodded over at him. She snorted in appreciation.

  I turned my gaze back toward Jack. I thought he might wave or cheer or grin, the way a boy might if he’d hit a home run or won a round of capture the flag. Instead, he tilted his chin toward the sky and closed his eyes against the rain. Like that water might baptize him anew, even though he’d already been washed clean by the river. Like it was him who had needed saving that day instead of the Coombs twins.

  No one else saw the rawboned boy point his face skyward. They were too busy clutching each other and laughing in relief, already telling one another the story, as if we hadn’t all just seen it for ourselves.

  Daddy put Jack on the front page the next day. LOCAL HERO SAVES TODDLER TWINS FROM DROWNING DEATH, read the headline.

  And from then on, that’s what Jack Bailey was. Not a boy. A hero.

  We argued over the specifics. How long Jack went under the water (some people swore he’d been down there a full two minutes). How much those twins must have weighed soaking wet. Whether he’d found the strength from within or whether it was given to him by the Lord, whom Pastor Douglass had called down to help not a moment too soon.

  But we all agreed on the main thing. Jack Bailey was a hero.

  We didn’t stop to wonder what that made us.

  So that was the story we told about Jack. The story that followed him for years, like a faithful old dog. But that was not Jack’s story.

  Despite everything that would happen between us, I’m not sure I ever knew his story.

  I think he tried, once, to tell me. It was months after Jack had come to stay with us, after we’d started doing the paper route together. After I’d come to think of him as my friend. We were lying on our backs on the river dock, basking in the sun. Summer was just spreading its bright wings over Foggy Gap.

  That was the day he’d told me about Yonder.

  Maybe if I had been listening more closely, I would have understood what he was trying to say.

  Maybe then when he went missing, I would have known that Officer Sawyer was right. It would have been better not to look for him at all.

  But I was too busy trying to be a detective, searching for clues. Like Nancy Drew, who always solved the case in the books Lou gave me to read (in secret—if Bruce Pittman caught me reading a book about a girl, he’d have hated me worse than he already did).

  I wish now I had tried as hard to be a good friend as I tried to be the hero of the story. Maybe then I could have been both.

  But there was so much I didn’t understand then. About Jack, about our own small town, and the great wide world. About war. And about my place in all of it.

  I didn’t yet understand that every hero has a story. But not every story has a hero.

  Even now, after all this time, I’m still trying to figure out which one this is.

  A hero’s story. Or a story without a hero.

  1

  June 1943

  FRIDAY

  Just before Jack disappeared, it had been stifling hot in Foggy Gap. That was rare. Usually even when the temperatures climbed to swimming-hole weather, a breeze would float down off the mountains, the same way Mama blew on my brow when I was feverish.

  But that June, we’d have had better luck waiting for a breeze blowing in from the sea. Of course, though three whole years had passed since the Great Flood of 1940, none of us would ever wish for a sea breeze again. The flood might have ultimately spared the Coombs twins, but it had taken a good deal more from Foggy Gap than just Mr. Maynard’s car.

  When I woke up on Friday morning, I found the rainstorm from the night before had broken the heat. I thrust my window open higher and emptied the rainwater from the bucket I had set out underneath where the roof leaked. It had been a hard rain, all right. The bucket was nearly full. But now the dawn was turning pink, last night’s storm already forgotten.

  Mama wasn’t awake yet when I got to the kitchen. That wasn’t so unusual these days. Not since she’d gotten bigger around the middle. The baby, she said, made her awfully tired.

  I didn’t like thinking too much about the baby, even if Granny Mabel called it a “miracle child” in her letters (because in all the nearly thirteen years since I’d been born, Mama had never had another). I would have plenty of time to think about the baby once it arrived. Then we’d see about all that miracle business.

  I brought in the morning’s milk from our front stoop and poured some over a bowl of cornflakes. I started to shake a teaspoon of sugar over them, but as I picked up the jar, I could feel that it was almost empty. We had no more stamps for sugar left in our ration book that month, so I put the jar back.

  Sugar was a small sacrifice, as sacrifices went in those days.

  It was like the signs in the shop windows in town said. Rationing means a fair share for all of us!

  Feeling satisfied with this minor act of patriotism, I wolfed down the soggy cereal, drained the milk from the bowl, and headed for the door. Outside, warblers and wrens were already filling the pine boughs with song. Ripening tomatoes hung on the vines in the victory garden Mrs. Musgrave had helped Mama and me plant after Daddy left for the war.

  We lived in a two-story cedar house with a driveway and a porch at the end of a street of other two-story cedar houses with driveways and porches. They had all been built before the Great Depression, and you could tell by looking at them how the families inside had fared in those years.

  (“First we had the Great War,” Lou said to me once, back when we were still friends. “Then the Great Depression. And then the Great Flood. I wish Greatness would just leave us be for once.” And I couldn’t help thinking that she had a point.)

  I inhaled the smell of bacon and rising biscuits as I biked past the familiar houses toward town. I kept time as I climbed up the hill toward the newspaper office, trying to see if I could beat my personal best of forty-seven seconds. The burn in my calves made me proud as I whizzed easily past Dinwiddie’s General Store and the Skyline Diner. The sun was just starting to break over the mountains like an egg cracked into a frying pan.

  Mornings like that, it was easy to forget about the war, even though the papers I delivered every day were full of it. Even though victory gardens just like ours had sprouted up in lots of other lawns, and service flags hung from the windows of many of the houses on my route. We had a service flag in our front window, too, with one blue star stitched on it.
That star was a reminder of Daddy, who was somewhere overseas fighting his share of the war.

  His last letter had come only days ago and had assured us that he was doing just fine, though the food was terrible. I don’t know what he wrote after that, because the censors had blacked out his words. Even when I tried to make a rubbing of his letter on another sheet of paper, I couldn’t make anything out. We weren’t allowed to know anything about where Daddy was or what he was doing.

  I pulled up in front of the Herald office just as the first beads of sweat were appearing on my forehead. I looked for Jack’s bike, but it was nowhere to be seen. That was unusual, because Jack nearly always got to the office before I did. A bell chimed as the door opened and Mr. Maynard came trundling out, chest puffed up like he was looking for a fight (which he usually was).

  “Morning, Mr. Maynard.”

  He tipped his hat at me before glancing down at his watch. “Little late, aren’t we?”

  “Yessir.”

  If I was late, that meant Jack was even later.

  “Your mama going to be in this morning?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good,” he said, without sounding like he meant it. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, which was quite large on account of his receding hairline, before putting his hat back on. “We have some things to talk about. Better get on your way. The news won’t keep, will it?”

  I suppressed a yawn. “No, sir.”

  Mr. Maynard owned all the papers in our corner of the mountains, including the Hilltop Herald. Until Daddy had enlisted that January, he had been editor of the Herald. When he left, he had convinced Mr. Maynard to let Mama take his place. She’d been to college to study English literature after all, and it’s not like there was a line of men waiting to fill Daddy’s shoes. Women were doing all sorts of jobs that had belonged to men before.

  Mr. Maynard had reluctantly agreed but had taken to buzzing around the office like a great big carpenter bee. Determined to make trouble wherever he could. He nearly turned purple when Mama told him about the baby, but she insisted she could keep doing the job, and so she had.

  Just outside the office, the day’s papers had been tied into bundles. Jack and I delivered them to all the businesses and houses in town, while Billy Updike drove the rest out to the folks who lived down in the hollers and out on the farms, where red barns dotted the green hills like ladybugs crawling all over a summer garden.