“Who’s driving?”
“Too far to tell.”
“Hyah!” Mary gave Star several stiff kicks, and the horse picked up the pace, albeit more trot than gallop.
“It’s the boys.”
“Hyah!”
Star got the message, and a second later his legs stretched into a gallop.
“Mary!” Elaine held on tight. “Mary! We’re going too fast!”
Mary took a quick glance behind them. The truck was about two hundred feet away, and closing the gap.
“Mary—I don’t want to fall!”
“Just hold on!”
They could hear the boys now, taunting, whooping, and hollering. Scaring the girls was their favorite game, and the game was on. The truck’s horn began blaring with an insistent repetition.
“Clarence is driving!”
Mary looked for an escape, but there was none. At this section of the road, steep irrigation ditches lined both sides—the only way out was forward.
“What are they going to do!?”
Then the truck was immediately upon them, threatening to ram Mary’s horse. At the wheel, Clarence continued to sound the truck’s horn, and the whooping and hollering got louder. Elaine turned her head and could see Michael sitting next to Clarence, with Vernon standing in the back, his hands gripping the stakes.
“They’ve been drinking,” she said, holding her mouth next to Mary’s ear.
The truck accelerated and pulled beside them.
“Ya wanna race!?” shouted Clarence. “Come on! Let’s race to the house!”
Mary kept her gaze straight ahead—the property-line gate was not far ahead.
“Push ’em! Push ’em over!” Vernon began banging on the roof of the truck. “Push ’em into the ditch!”
Clarence turned the steering wheel slightly, bringing the truck within inches of the stirrups. Despite the danger, all three of her brothers were laughing. Mary and Elaine were terrified.
“Do it! Push ’em in!”
“Race us or you’re goin’ in,” said Michael.
The truck nudged the stirrups, and Elaine screamed. Mary could tell Clarence was serious. Bluffing was not something he was prone to. The gate was less than a hundred feet away, but Mary could tell there would not be enough room for both horse and truck to pass through together. Someone had to yield. Clarence looked ahead, realized what was about to happen, then shouted at Mary.
“Where do you go every night!?”
But Mary kept the reigns loose.
“Where do you go, Mary!? We’re tired of searching the farm for you.”
“Tell us, or you’re going into the ditch!” added Michael.
Side-by-side, the flatbed truck and the horse arrived at the gate. Mary prayed, Elaine screamed, and the boys laughed. Then Star—the over-the-hill feedbag that no one thought was of much value—did something he had never done before: he leaped into the air and sailed clean over the gate.
Mary pulled up on the reigns and brought her horse to a stop directly in front of the house. There was going to be trouble. She had bested her older brothers—more than bested, and that wasn’t going to sit well. By refusing to yield, she had denied them their puerile victory and bruised their pride. Not just one of them, but all three of them. Simultaneously. Elaine was safe, but Mary was sure she was going to get the switch.
Mary jumped to the ground, then pulled Elaine off the saddle. She carried her younger sister up the steps and into the house, praying that one of her parents was home. She also prayed for a miracle—that today would be different. That her mother and father would break from tradition and not automatically side with the boys.
Mary set Elaine down and latched the door.
“Mom?”
No answer.
“Dad?”
Still no answer.
Through a window Mary could see Clarence was already looking for a switch, and one of the boys was pounding on the door.
By the time the girls realized their parents were not home, Clarence had entered through the kitchen door, a long maple tree branch in his right hand. Mary unlatched the front door and the girls ran outside—where Michael and Vernon grabbed them.
“You deserve this,” said Clarence, and began swatting Mary’s bare legs over and over. As Mary screamed and twisted, the photograph fell from her dress pocket. Clarence picked it up.
“What the hell is this?”
Mary was crying, so Elaine answered. “Mrs. Gudmund gave it to us.”
Clarence roughly held it against Mary’s face.
“You know how mother feels about pictures.” Clarence took a closer look at the photo. “Ya know somethin’—you look ugly.”
Michael leaned over to see. “Real ugly. Hey Vernon, wanna seem some real ugly girls?”
“Give it back, Clarence!” Mary reached for it, but Clarence held it just out of her grasp, laughing. Vernon stepped over to look.
“Oh yeah, they’z ugly.”
“Give it back!”
Both girls were crying now.
“Please give it back.”
“Oh boy—they’re so ugly.”
“Give it back!”
The more they pleaded, the more the boys laughed and played keep-away with the photo. Amy came around the corner of the barn to see what the noise was about. Mary turned to her older sister, tears now covering her cheeks.
“Amy! Help us! Mrs. Gudmund took a photograph of me and Elaine, and they won’t give it back.”
Amy shook her head. “You know Momma doesn’t abide photography.” Then she disappeared into the house.
“Ya want your stupid photograph back? Here!” Clarence stooped down and stuck the photo into a large wet clog of horse dung. The three boys walked away, still laughing.
“Bye, ugly girls!” shouted Vernon as they rounded the edge of the barn.
Mary picked the photo out of the gooey manure. With one hand she wiped the tears from her cheeks, then used that now-moist hand to clean the oily green slime from the photograph.
“We are ugly,” Mary whispered.
Still crying, Elaine shook her head. “No we’re not. We’re not ugly.”
“We’re ugly.”
“No we’re not!”
Mary held the left side of the photo tight, then pulled forward with her right, ripping the photo in two.
“Mary! What are you doing!?”
“We’re ugly!” she shouted.
Mary continued to rip and tear the photograph in ever smaller segments, until they could not be torn any further. Then she opened her hands and allowed the shreds to fall toward the ground. At that very instant, a cold Canadian wind rushed through the farm, lifting the photo remnants toward a gray, god-centered sky. Refusing to yield to gravity, they fluttered and flurried and scattered ever higher.
Elaine threw her arms around her sister, the Canadian wind blowing their hair over their faces.
“We’re not ugly.”
Their cheeks touched, and for a few seconds the chemicals of their tears mixed and slurried into a powerful new compound. Their embrace tightened, neither wanting to let go of the other. Time passed, and they eventually released. Mary turned and walked away. Elaine watched her go, watched as Mary entered the dry, brown field of last season’s wheat and vanished into its crowded boscage. Though Elaine could no longer see her sister, she could hear Mary’s sobbing.
Elaine called out.
“We’re not ugly!”
7.
THE GREAT ESCAPE
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.”
Walter Dornberger was a mechanical engineer and captain in the German army during the 1930s. And he was one of the first of von Braun’s countrymen to recognize the young man’s genius and potential.[1] The moment the two men first met at a small solid rocket test conducted in 1932 near Berlin, Dornberger had decided to take von Braun under his wing. Without the captain’s early help and mentorship, it is very possible history would have been written quite differently. By 1937 the two men were working together at Peenemünde, Dornberger in charge of the business end of rocket affairs, and von Braun heading up the engineering end.[2] The two men would take a little-noticed backwater technology program and build it into the pride of Germany and the technological envy of the world.
1
Bob Ward,
2
Michael J. Neufeld,