The Avion My Uncle Flew Read Free

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.
    I upset my mother, too. For about the first time I can remember, my mother and father nearly quarreled. My mother said, “But, Richard—” which is my father’s name. “But, Richard, those Army doctors were very rough with him. After all, Johnny’s only a little boy.”
    â€œA little boy?” said my father, his voice going kind of queer. “He’s almost thirteen, and in another three or four years, the way he’s starting to shoot up, he’ll be bigger than I am. Those doctors weren’t rough on him. They were busy. They came up here to look at him as a favor to me, my dear.”
    â€œPerhaps,” my mother said, “we shouldn’t plan to go to France with you, Richard. Perhaps we’ve made a mistake to do this with Johnny.”
    My father got a gray sort of sadness in his face.