Chapter 9 — Thanksgiving
Kennebec Academy
Sunday night Dear Dad, This started out to be a pretty lousy weekend, but as it worked out, parts of it were pretty good. A week ago Saturday I got a letter from Ma saying that our Thanksgiving at home had caved in. She and Sally had to be with you in Chicago, so I had to stay at school. That’s the first Thanksgiving we have ever missed. I suppose there will be others. That same day we played our last football game and we lost it – I lost it. It takes eleven men to win a game and only one to lose it. I fouled up the coach’s instructions and Penobscot got the ball for just one play and scored and we lost, giving us a 0-6 record for my year as captain. You can’t do worse than that. Then on Wednesday we had a special Thanksgiving chapel with Pilgrims, Indians, fish in the corn hills and turkeys, ending up with everyone thanking God for taking care of them – the survivors, that is. The Pilgrims who died of pneumonia in the winter probably didn’t feel so good about God. And if we are supposed to thank God for our good fortune, can we ask him what he is doing for the poor guys thirsting to death in Africa or getting tortured in South America? I can’t buy that ‘thank God’ stuff even though I must admit we are doing pretty well ourselves. It sounds just too smug. Well, anyway, the school flushed out after lunch Wednesday except for a few of us orphans. There were only two guys left in our dorm and none on my floor. An empty dorm is pretty empty. You don’t realize how much noise there usually is, but when you don’t hear it, it is like all the people in Buffalo waking up when Niagara Falls freezes up. No radios, no yelling, no footsteps, no one flushing the can or bouncing a basketball or even slamming a door. Dead quiet. I couldn’t stand it so I wandered around outside for a while, but it got dark pretty soon and I came in again and watched TV and that was lousy too. Supper was nothing. They just laid out cold cuts and bread and milk and peanut butter and said help yourself. After, I tried to do my English. Mr. Floyd gave us a comp to write over the vacation – “What I Am Thankful For” – and he said not to put in the usual junk, but to think about it. I tried to think about it, but I couldn’t think of much to be thankful for so I caved in and went to bed in that empty dorm and that was lousy too. Things looked up a little on Thursday. It was a nice day when the sun finally came up. I had just got out of the shower when I heard the front door slam and someone coming up the stairs. It was Mr. Benson, the art teacher. He saw my door open. “Thank God there’s someone left around here. I need a strong back and a weak mind to help get my boat into the shed for the winter. Want to help? I’ll give you a proper dinner for it.” I didn’t have anything to do and old Jerry is a pretty good guy for an art teacher. Some artists are pretty flaky, but he’s all right. I threw on a pair of jeans and we went down to the cove. Jock Peterson, the crew captain, was there and Jerry’s daughter, Alice. She is one tough girl – built like a brick church, but OK. The boat was in a cradle on the stony beach in front of the shed. He had loaded the cradle with rocks, floated the boat into it on the high water at 4 am in the dark, and now we had to haul the cradle into the shed. First we chucked off the rocks. That was easy with four of us doing it. Then Jerry got a pry with a rock for a bait – that’s what you call the thing the pry rests on, the fulcrum – and while Jock and I pulled down on the pry, Alice shoved a plank and a roller under the cradle. We did it again on the 43
