Chapter 20 — Undivided Share
A
s the last days of winter thawed into March, the course of good education ceased to run smoothly at Kennebec Academy. Almost everyone began to notice things going awry. Johnny sat in the library puzzling out a stuffy article in the encyclopedia on Joseph Conrad. The ninth grade class had been assigned to write a brief biography of the novelist, and the encyclopedia appeared to be the only easily available source. Johnny had had to wait and wait for it as each of his classmates extracted the nuggets of fact from the piles of prose. At last it was his turn and now he became aware that people were collecting books, picking up papers, putting on coats. The librarian was checking window locks, closing up his desk, and straightening magazines with one eye on the clock now creeping up to ten. In three minutes Johnny would have to turn in the book and then wait out the line again tomorrow. Quickly he slipped the volume on to his lap under the table, opened his knife and slit out the page. He folded it once and put it in his notebook. “Cloooooosing,” said the librarian. Johnny felt badly about the page when he got back in his room, but he soon talked himself into defense. “It’s really my book. Look at all I pay in tuition. Certainly I deserve to have one lousy page out of one lousy old book, so I can learn and study like anyone else.” He knew it was a poor argument, but he said it over and over again and believed it before he went to sleep. The next morning, livid with rage, Mr. Sanborn, the librarian, stood before the Assistant Headmaster’s desk, holding the mutilated book in his hand. “Look at that – deliberately, some kid took a knife and deliberately slit out that page. Just slit it out and ruined the book for everyone else. It was someone in Mr. Floyd’s class, I’m sure of it. I don’t know who, but I’ll wring that little rascal’s neck!” He choked and gasped with rage, pain, and indignation. “But sir, I couldn’t do the homework because someone cut the page out of the book.” “But sir – but sir – but sir.” The washbasin on the wall in the dormitory bathroom had served generations of boys at Kennebec as they shave their first fuzzy mustaches before the cracked mirror above it. The basin was a little loose on the wall and wiggled if you jarred it hard. Stan and his roommate, Bill, were horsing around in the bathroom. Sam soaked a washrag and slammed it at Bill. Bill picked it up to slam it back and ducked into one of the toilets. Bill threw a glass of water over the top. Stan wet a wad of toilet paper, burst out the door and slammed it back. Bill lurched back against the mirror. The basin moved, and a chunk of plaster fell off the wall next to it. Both boys saw it and each tried to shove the other against the basin again. Each time it grew looser, then hung like loose tooth by the pipes, and, at the next slam it fell completely clear, crashed to the floor, two geysers spurted from the broken pipes and the boys fled, laughing. When water began to drip through the ceiling in Mr. Johnson’s study, he ran upstairs, found the flood pouring from under the bathroom door, rushed in, found the valves and shut off the spouting water. The broken shards of the basin lay on the floor. Mr. Johnson seized all the towels in sight, tried to slop up the water, and wondered where the boys were. It wasn’t natural for them to miss a scene like this. He knocked on Josh Burns’s door. Josh was sitting at his desk, chin on hand, bending over a geometry book, apparently oblivious to Noah’s flood across the hall. “Oh sir, yes sir. I was doing geometry, 89
