Chapter 5 — Indian Summer

The old gentleman drove slowly up the drive past the New School past the Headmaster’s house, past Chelsea House, McFarland House, Brackett House, Kenniston House, past the big assembly halllibrary-art studio, and started around the circle again, but stopped this time in front of the New School. He got out of his car just a little stiffly and climbed the wooden steps, stopped to look up at the school seal carved in wood over the door, a compass card with “SCIENTIA VIRES INDUCIT below it. He had never been a really tall man and now was a little stooped, but he moved quite briskly for a man of eighty. He was dressed appropriately for a visit to the Headmaster in the style of an age now a bit behind us, in white shirt, tweed jacket and necktie. He wore no hat this mild October morning over his abundant gray hair. He looked the image of a retired schoolmaster, and indeed that is what he was. He turned and looked out over the circle with the tall, white flagpole made from the mizzen mast of one of Captain Kenniston’s schooners, complete with cross trees, gaff and topmast. He watched a puff of October breeze stir the red swallowtail pennant with a yellow K at the topmast head, the house flag of Captain Kenniston’s fleet. At the peak of the gaff flew the United States ensign. His glance circled the drive again, roved to the pond, to the hill beyond, still bright with red and yellow maple. He turned and stepped into the hall through the door held open by a smooth, round beach rock. “Can I help you, sir?” inquired Pat Goodrich, the Headmaster’s secretary, through the open office door on his left. She sounded as if she really did want to help him. “Is the Headmaster by chance at liberty for a moment? My name is Hunt, Elwood Alison Hunt. I used to teach here before the war, the Big War, and would like his permission to look about a bit.” “Oh, when were you here?” “From 1932 to 1942. I left to join the Navy.” “That was when Ted Ashley was Headmaster, wasn’t it?” “A great man, madam. He gave me a running start in teaching, and I suppose you could say I am still running if not still teaching.” “Well, you don’t really need the Headmaster’s permission to walk around the school, but I am sure he will want to talk with you. He is busy right now, but if you can come back in an hour, I will see that he is free then.” Mr. Hunt thanked her and stepped out on to the porch again. Were these the same boards he had trod in 1942 when he left Ted Ashley’s office to join the Navy? He turned to the right, following the drive in front of the Headmaster’s house, a four square, two story building built about the time of the Civil War by Captain Kenniston. After a successful career as a shipmaster, he had come ashore, established a shipyard in what had become known as Coniston’s Cove, built wooden schooners and sent them to sea with cargoes of fish, potatoes, lumber, granite and ice. He had dammed the brook to power his sawmill, and when the ice business developed, had raised the dam, expanded the pond, and cut ice that cooled the drinks of the wealthy from Boston to Rio de Janeiro. Between the Headmaster’s house and the New School stood the little one-room school, the ancestor of Kennebec Academy, built by Captain Kenniston in 1886 as a convenience for the children of his shipyard workers who lived across the cove. He stopped at the top of the steep bank to look out over the cove and the broad Kennebec, brown near the shore, blue in the distance, rushing from the mountains to the sea with the ebb tide, the far bank hazy yellow in the gentle fall sunlight. Below him he saw the roof of the boathouse, once a spar shed where 24

skillful adze-men fashioned spars for schooners. Elwood remembered that when he had come as a young man, the shed had been almost in ruins, its roof sagging, its sills rotten. He remembered how his colleagues, Ed Somes and Frank Bacheller, had persuaded Ted Ashley to excuse from football volunteers to fix up the old shed. God! How those kids had loathed football. But they loved square and rule, hammer and saw, and especially the big building jacks that straightened the new sills and brought the ridgepole into line. He could still hear the echo of their hammers driving shingle nails in the still October afternoons. Now the building, no doubt with another new roof, was stout and strong. In front of it a long, low float stretched out into the cove with a punt tied alongside. On the still water of the cove floated a 30-foot sloop, several small sailboats and a lobster boat. The stairs down the bank were long and steep for creaky knees, so Elwood took the easier road, which came out on a lawn next to the boathouse. The rhythmic swish of fine sandpaper came from the open double doors. A tall man in overalls sanding the bottom of a rowing shell looked up as Elwood’s shadow fell across the floor. “I’m Elwood Hunt. I used to teach here some years ago. Just looking around. Don’t let me interfere.” “Glad to meet you. I’m Cap Milliken. I do whatever needs doing. Can’t use a sander on these thinskinned boats – just elbow grease. When were you here, sir?” “About 100 years ago, seems though. I left to join the Navy in the Big War.” “Before my time. I came in ’57.” “In my time we never had anyone to take care of the boats. Coaches and managers did it all.” “Well, I kind of stepped into a bear trap here. I was a rigger at the Iron Works and got a call to come up here and rig new halyards on the flagpole. You know there’s a lot of rigging on that mast for a vessel carrying no sail. Well, sir, I did it. Then waiting for my wife to come and pick me up, I drifted down here to the shore and here’s a shell laid out on horses just like this one with a great split in the planking. We didn’t have plywood shells then or fiberglass ones either. And there was the coach, Whitty Whitmore, that is, standing there looking sadly at it with a whole crowd of boys. He didn’t have time to fix it then and told that crew they couldn’t row that day. We got talking about it and I allowed I could cobble it together somehow. He gave me the glue and tools and a piece of plank, only 3/l6-ths it was, and he went off in the launch to coach the first and second boats. I got it together somehow, and he was real pleased with the job. The Headmaster, Dr. Oswald it was then, called me and asked me to take the job part time. Now I have a full time job here and fix shells and do a lot of other stuff too. Clean a furnace this afternoon likely.” “That’s the way I have found it in schools too. The people who are willing to do it, do it; the others …” He shrugged. “Does that sailboat belong to the school?” “No. That’s Jerry Benson’s boat. He’s the art teacher. Those two small ones – the summer school kids built them this last summer. Neat jobs, too.” “Thanks, Cap. I won’t trouble you further.” Elwood walked out on the float just because it was there and he liked to feel the river under him, stood on the end in the warm sun smelling the clam flats, swamp grass and salt water, listening to the waterfall spilling over the old milldam from the pond. Without bothering Cap, he went back up the road, stopped a moment to catch his breath and look over at where the ruins of the ice house had been by the pond, continued around the drive by the houses built in the time of the shipyard’s prosperity by boss carpenters, riggers, and caulkers, who worked in the yard. Now a master and a few boys lived in each. Chelsea House, McFarland House, Brackett House, raw and new looking when he had left, now had a settled-in look. The flowerbeds beside the walk in front of Chelsea House had been dug up. Someone must be going to plant bulbs for spring. Kenniston House and the assembly hall still stood as he had remembered them although the studio on the back of the latter was new. He remembered how Tod Taylor had exulted over the new stage, had produced plays that people came from two counties to see, got the kids so wound up about it that he started a summer theater. Wonder what happened to Tod?

He looked across the well-mowed fields with their white goal posts to the great grey square block of the gym. Not an attractive structure – much bigger than it used to be – no doubt efficient. We called it the Temple of Sweat. Mr. Sawyer welcomed him into the office. “I’m sorry I could not greet you when you arrived, Mr. Hunt, but I had a sticky case of bullying to deal with and had to carry through with it.” The Headmaster set a chair for him before the picture window, back to the desk, and another for himself. “Well, Mr. Hunt, after your inspection do you find things much changed from the days before the war?” “My first name is Elwood, a convenient handle, sir. No, not changed a great deal. The old ice house and the mill have gone. There was a shaky old wharf, but I understand Ted Ashley – he was Headmaster then – had it demolished before someone got hurt on it. The boat house is much more elegant now and you have a few new buildings.” “I wonder about the spirit of the school, the feel of it. Is it still the kind of school it was?” “I really don’t know. It is the people that make the difference, and I have only met three people this morning: you, your secretary, and a fellow named Cap at the boathouse. A very pleasant fellow.” “Indeed he is, and a vital part of the school. He is in charge of maintenance for the whole place. But tell me how it was in the 1930’s. Was there any of the feel of the old days left then?” “There were still people around who remembered Captain Kenniston. He established the school in 1903, I think it was, on the site of his shipyard, originally for the families who lived here and worked in the yard. He left the school 500 acres, the buildings, wharves and sheds, most of his fortune and his house flag. More important than these, he left it an ideal, a conviction, that a good man can do anything well … But I am afraid I bore you. Old men talking of ‘the way it used to be’ tend to be unduly garrulous, not to say windy.” “Not at all, Elwood. The history of this school has never been written and we know too little about it. Carry on. Would you mind if I started my tape recorder?” “Oh no. It probably won’t even slow me up. Well, to continue. “Captain Kenniston himself could team a yoke of oxen, fell a tree on a peg, swim the river, or build a vessel, load her with Kennebec ice, sail her to India and get home for Christmas, loaded to the scuppers with coffee and pepper, teak, calico and cloves. He founded a school where a young man would be judged not on one standard but on many standards, where he would be admired and rewarded for what he could do and would do and did do and not damned for what he could not do. “Fortunately the Captain found for his first Headmaster Mr. Emmons, a man who had sailed with him before the mast as a youth, then gone to Bowdoin and on into teaching. By the time I got to Kennebec, Captain Kenniston and Mr. Emmons were but legends in the minds of our older colleagues, but their stories of the old days carried the tradition. They told of how one spring two boys against orders were skating on the shore ice along the river when a pan they were on broke off and went spinning down the river on the tide, crowded in among a lot of smaller cakes. They yelled, of course. Mr. Emmons, then close to seventy, heard them, hailed the nearest man for help, and sprinted for the shore. They shoved off in a leaky skiff, the man bailing and the Headmaster at the oars. He found he could not row among the small cakes of ice all around, so he leaped aft, put one oar over the stern, and sculled that skiff through the jostling cakes. He got the boys aboard and set them ashore two miles down stream, soaking wet. They all four walked home together over the frozen mud of the dirt road, the ice crackling on their wet clothes and arrived chilled to the bone and dead tired. The Old Man gave them a solid lecture on the perils of spring ice and of disobeying orders, a mug of hot tea sweetened with molasses and laced with rum, and then conducted prayers and study hall as usual. When I was here, the feeling was still in the air that the man who could and would find a way to meet the challenge was the man to admire. We had all kinds in Kenniston Hall where I lived. There was Sam Sewall, a big boy, a junior – very sharp. I think he had a visual memory, a photographic memory. He could

look at a steamer going up the river by the school in the morning and that night tell you how many lifeboats she had on her port side. He could look at a map of the battle of Gettysburg and later tell you how the 20th Maine seized Little Round Top and where Pickett’s charge started. He was an all-A man. He was rather fat, but strong and tough inside. He played halfback and was an adversary to be feared. We liked Sammy all right, but he was just a little arrogant, just a little too sure he was right. He went his own way without much concern for others. Then there was Peanut Kelley. He was little, of course, and pretty quiet. I taught him math, and it was no easy task. I couldn’t hold his mind on the job. He would follow a problem on the board with serious eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, watching the x’s drift to one side of the equation, the fractions disappear, perhaps even seeing the solution coming up, and then I would lose him into another world. His eyes would drop, his pencil doodle in his notebook, and he would all but disappear himself. He wrote some remarkably good poetry for the magazine. I intended to bring you one this morning, but I couldn’t find it last night. It was about ebb tide on the river. You could see the rush of all the rain in the state of Maine running down that river before you, with the flats baring out and a vessel going down to sea with the fair tide under her. But there was more to it than that. It made me feel sad and sort of quivery. He was a weird kid, that Peanut,” Hunt paused. “Why do I run on like this?” “Go on, Elwood.” “Your mention of bullying brought it to mind. Well, I was going to tell you about Sammy and another kid named Ike. Ike had a single room on the ground floor. He was a loner, sort of shy and scaredlike. He was a nice lad, but no one paid much attention to him. One spring evening, one of the first days it was warm enough to be outside in your shirtsleeves between supper and study hall, I heard Sammy snapping a great bullwhip he had brought back from Wyoming. It was about ten feet long with a lash on the end and snapped like a rifle. Sammy said it would take the hide off a buffalo. He got to snapping it around and telling kids, “Dance or I’ll skin you!” and snapping the whip at their heels. He never hit anyone, but they danced all right, pretending not to be scared. That loner, Ike, came along the path toward the dorm minding his own business. “Dance,” said Sammy, “Dance, Ike, or I’ll snap the hide off you.” He was just kidding, of course; but Ike didn’t know how to dance and just kept going. Sammy gave the whip an almighty crack just ahead of Ike, and Ike stopped short. “Dance, Ike, or I’ll snap the buttons off your fly.” The other kids, relieved perhaps at not being snapped at themselves, shouted, “Dance, Ike! Dance!” Ike stood still, dead white. “Dance, Ike.” Sammy snapped the whip behind him and Ike bolted for his room in panic, everyone pelting after him. “Come on out, Ike, and dance.” SNAP went the whip, or we’ll come in and shave you all over.” Ike must have pushed the bureau against the door and the bed against the bureau. “Drown him out! Drown him out!” Someone got a wastebasket of water and poured it on the floor so it ran under the door. They started a bucket brigade. “Get him through the window.” “Bust the door.!” CRACK went the whip. “Shave Ike! Shave Ike! Shave Ike!” Then Peanut Kelley exploded. Dreamy little Peanut who had never hit anyone in his life, had looked in the window, seen Ike braced against the wall holding the bed against the bureau against the door, nearly ankle deep in water and looking with terror at the faces crowding the window. “Peanut went at Sammy like a hornet, grabbed the whip out of his astonished hand, and swung it at him with all he had. He didn’t know how to snap it, but he left a red welt across Sammy’s astonished face, and big Sammy fled, Peanut laying it across him as he ran. Then Peanut turned on the rest of the crowd and drove them like chickens.

“When I arrived on the scene, Peanut was alone in front of Ike’s silent door, sobbing with nervous exhaustion. Later that evening, after we got Ike calmed down and Peanut had gone to bed, I asked Sammy why he had done such a cruel thing as pick on Ike.” “Oh, I didn’t want to hurt him. We were just having a little fun with him. Can’t he take a joke? No one meant anything by it. Of course we wouldn’t really shave him. No big deal.” “I don’t think that big, bright, insensitive barbarian ever did comprehend what he had done, for all his A’s and his letter sweaters, but the rest of the dorm knew and were silently ashamed.” Elwood slumped back in his chair, staring up the river into a day half a century gone. “We don’t seem to have changed a great deal, Elwood. At least I don’t think we have.” “Can you tell me more about Ted Ashley? I have heard that he practically re-established the school.” “He did. But talking about those days seemed to take it out of me somehow. I better go along.” “I hope you’ll come again and tell us more. You may be just the man to write a proper history of the school.” “Another day. May I come back and in a manner haunt the school like a pleasant old ghost? I would like that.” “You certainly may, and you’ll be more than welcome. Any time you like.” Mr. Hunt stepped out with a pleasant nod to Pat and drove off leaving an aura of history behind him.