The River Between Us - Softcover

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RICHARD PECK (1934-2018) was born in Decatur, Illinois and lived in New York City for nearly 50 years. The acclaimed author of 35 novels for children and young adults, he won the Newbery Medal for A Year Down Yonder, a Newbery Honor for A Long Way from Chicago, the Scott O’Dell Award for The River Between Us, the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Are You in the House Alone?, a Boston Globe-Horn BookAward Honor for The Best Man, and the Christopher Medal for The Teacher’s Funeral. He was the first children’s author ever to have been awarded a National Humanities Medal, and was twice a National Book Award Finalist.  

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THE SEARCH FOR NOAH

“Where is he?” Delphine demanded to know, gazing about for anything resembling a hospital.

“There are six regimental hospitals,” Dr. Hutchings said. “Those three tents are one of them.”

“We go there.” Delphine hiked her shortened skirts.

“Oh no, Miss Duval.” The doctor put out a hand to bar her way—never a good idea. “No women—ladies—are allowed in the hospital tents. It’s entirely for your own good. The men are in their underwear, and there are no blankets and . . .” Dr. Hutchings was getting right down to the end of his rope.

Delphine had drawn up to her almost five feet without the heeled slippers. She glanced back at me, and her veiled eyes sparked their dark fire. “This girl’s brother is in that tent. Is it so?”

Dr. Hutchings admitted it was.

“You are not an officer to command me. And me, I am not a soldier.” She pointed herself out with a gloved finger. “And if I was, I wouldn’t be soldiering on this side. Get the quilt,” she said to me.

The doctor was this close to wringing his hands. “Truly, Miss Pruitt,” he said as we bore down on the tent flap, “I can’t permit—” But it would have taken five or six men his size to keep us out. I wanted my brother.

BOOKS BY RICHARD PECK

Amanda/Miranda

Are You in the House Alone?

The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

Dreamland Lake

Fair Weather

Father Figure

The Ghost Belonged to Me

Ghosts I Have Been

Invitations to the World

A Long Way from Chicago

Lost in Cyberspace

Past Perfect, Present Tense

The River Between Us

Strays Like Us

The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts

A Year Down Yonder

RICHARD PECK

THE RIVER BETWEEN US

Table of Contents

The Model T Ford Touring Car

1916

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 been through the toolbox time and again. 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 aroused 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 on 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.

Dad’s plan was to keep the Mississippi River on our right side and try to be in the vicinity of Chester, Illinois, by nightfall. We made good time on dry roads south from Dupo and didn’t have our first flat until very near Waterloo. In all, we did pretty well with only four flats that day, one in each tire. But it seemed like the Ford was on a jack more than it was on the road. We pumped the tires up by hand. The last sign we saw for free air was outside Columbia.

The little boys needed a steady flow of water from the bottles we’d brought. This made for endless stops at the side of the road. This was a strictly men-only expedition, so we occasionally all four stood in a row over a ditch when the road was empty both directions. An hour of driving would pass before we’d see another car.

We’d pull up by open pasture and drop a ruler into the...