Home Front: When the Sergeant Came Marching Home by Don Lemna

Early in the summer of 1946, an infantry sergeant returned from the war and ruined my life by forcing me to move from our comfortable basement apartment in Wistola, Montana, out to a farm in the middle of nowhere.

At first the return of the Sergeant is great. His mom drives Don and six-year-old Pat down to Great Falls to meet the troop train. The family stays in a hotel, eats in restaurants, and even goes to a movie. The Sergeant marches in a stirring parade, shows Donald a heavy black handgun called a Luger for which he traded a pack of American cigarettes, and buys the family an old truck named Maggie. But then he buys something else--a farm--complete with a ramshackle house with no electricity and a privy with a crescent moon carved into the door.

I looked at my mother with tears in my eyes. I couldn't believe what she was doing to me. I didn't want to leave Milton and all my other friends. I didn't want to leave Mrs. Clarke at Wistola Elementary. I didn't want to leave the downtown, with its two movie theatres and the popcorn man and Riverside Park and all the other excitements.

"Will there be ducks?" Pat asked.

"I don't want to live on a farm," I groaned.

When I said this, my father's eyes became very hard and he looked down at me as if he were still a sergeant in the army.

"You'll do what you're told," the Sergeant said.

Donald spends his first days on the run-down farm sulking and avoiding his father, now the enemy, but as time goes by he begins to see the brighter side of rural life. Sentenced to shovel the droppings out of a long-abandoned chicken coop, he and Pat, become acquainted with their old plow horse when they decide to hitch him up to pull the chicken house to a cleaner spot of dirt. The coop collapses and their father makes them spend days taking the old boards apart and rebuilding the coop, but the boys do learn to ride their horse, curiously named Flight, all around the farm, provided they only turn left, the only direction the old horse will go.

With only girls for neighbors, Donald and Pat are forced to make friends with Charlie Pears, a slovenly and slothful neighbor who takes them on heart-pounding off-road jaunts in his ramshackle truck. Charlie also feeds them an exotic dish called beans and weenies and magnanimously gives them all his beer bottles--hundreds of them, worth ten cents a dozen in Wistola, which affords them a movie every Saturday in Wistola where they sell the eggs from the newly-housed hens. Then there's their farm's resident hermit, an old codger with a Santa Claus beard who tells them tall tales of the Great War while plying them with tea and rock-hard biscuits. And when school begins, Donald falls head over heels in love with the beautiful Miss Scott, who sings Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with her class between lessons.

Still, Donald plans to escape the farm, stashing his savings in a can hidden in the hayloft until he has enough to take him all the way to Hollywood, California. When his rich uncle sends him a ten dollar bill for his birthday, Donald has his grub stake to Tinsel Town and must only wait until school is out in June to be free of farm life at last. But when the long-awaited day comes, Don figures he might as well postpone departure until after the June picnic and concert and the Fourth of July celebration with all the free ice cream he can eat, and soon the long summer seems to be zooming by faster than the freight train he plans to ride to California.

Don Lemna's semi-autobiographical account of post-war farm life in rural Montana, When the Sergeant Came Marching Home, is a touching, authentic, and laugh-out-loud look at boyhood in a time that is fast receding into the past. Blessed with wonderful chapter head illustrations by Matt Collins, this nostalgic novel has broad appeal for all ages and deserves a place alongside Robert McCloskey's Homer Price and Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price as classic tales of mid-twentieth century boyhood.

Bonkers! Out in Left Field by Don Lemna

I was off in the right direction as soon as I heard the crack of the bat. This one was all mine.

The ball was on the way down and I was running flat out when Axel's shoulder brushed against me. "I got it!" he cried.

"It's mine!" I yelled.

But unfortunately when I bumped him away, for just a moment I took my eyes off the ball. The ball then completed its trajectory, smacking into my forehead. Darkness fell.

... As soon as my brain began to function, a ghastly beast lurking somewhere in the depths of my memory stood up on its hideous hind legs and staggered forward to confront me.

"I missed it!" I cried out. I had missed the catch that would have brought victory to our school. I had missed the catch that would have covered me with glory. Instead, I had covered myself with shame.

Belittled by Axel, who named him "Donald Duck" and hogs the outfield, Don had hoped to redeem himself in the big game, only to become the only boy in the history of Stanton School to have suffered a concussion caused by a fly ball.

Worried that his despair will impede his recovery, Don's parents try to raise his spirits by taking him to a movie in town--a rare treat in 1947. Don chooses the movie Robin Hood, and his spirits begin to rise. He will become a lethal archer and dazzle all the kids with his skill. But archery sets cost $8.99, an impossible sum on his cash-strapped farm, and Don sees that his only hope of redeeming his reputation is to collect enough beer bottles from the field of their hard-drinking neighbor Charlie to buy his own set. At two cents a bottle, Don figures that with the Schneider girls' red wagon he can earn the bow and arrow by hauling only 75 cases of 12 bottles each back home.

As I headed toward the road, I tried to figure out how many trips up and down the hill I'd have to make... at two cases per trip. By the time I reached the edge of the hill, I'd discovered that I was not able to do arithmetic in my head. It seemed to me that there would be half a trip left over. How could I make half a trip?

Don solves his math problem by charming Charlie into driving the needed bottles over in his truck. Even though he earns the archery set, it turns out not to be the panacea for his social problems he'd planned, and when his little brother cajoles him into a bow-and-arrow lesson, Pat manages to shoot the arrow over the barn and right into the rear end of the family's bull Rodger. When Rodger reacts by taking out the chicken coop, the archery gambit goes into hiatus.

No problem. When his mom refuses to do the job, Don determines to salvage his honor by offering to drive his father's truck at harvest time, a task which will get him out of school along with those admired eighth grade boys, but after some impressive initial lessons, Don manages to back the truck into the auger, and his truck-driving career goes on hold as well.

Undeterred, Don pins his social redemption hopes on hockey season, but when the pond finally freezes over, he discovers his old skates are too small and his parents insist that he has to wait until Christmas for new ones. Mom offers her old white figure skates, the wearing of which only results in more humiliation at the hands of Axel and his buddies, and when Don carefully pens a shamelessly begging letter to his rich aunt asking for skates, she misreads his overly fancy writing as a request for skiis, which Don manages to shatter in his first trip down Suicide Hill.

Don can't catch a break as his sixth-grade year marches on through one disaster after another, with the jubilant Axel making the most of every one of them. Don feels that inevitably he's going to have to fight the larger and stronger Axel in defense of his honor, but when that moment comes, the outcome is not at all what Donald expects.

Don Lemna's second semi-autobiographical tale of his Montana boyhood, Out in Left Field (Holiday House, 2012) is a hilarious sequel which compares well with Robert Peck's Soup series and is firmly in the American humor tradition of Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Dover Thrift Editions) and Tarkington's Penrod, Although the book's equally funny predecessor, When the Sergeant Came Marching Home, (see my review here) sets the scene in post-war rural America, "before the electricity" came to farm country, this one easily stands on its own. Perfect for family or classroom read alouds, Out in Left Field is a laugh-out-loud humorous bit of mid-century American historical fiction, a very different time when boys competed for status outdoors rather than at video games, but in which human nature remains totally recogizable.

"... Humor runs rampant throughout this story," says School Library Journal.