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

other side and were just getting ready to do it on the back when Jerry came tearing down the shore hollering to stop. We had to put a pinch line on her to keep her from rolling back. I never thought of that. Well, Jerry fired up the old Chevy engine in the back of the shed. No muffler of course. We hooked on a “tayckle” of two double blocks – a block is a pulley – to the cradle. Jerry took a couple of turns around the winch head and revved up the engine. The rope came taut and squeaked and began to drip. Jerry said you can tell when a rope is tight if it squeezes out water. He said if you want to draw a rope under strain, drip some water out of it. He certainly does notice things. I guess that is what an artist does. Well, bit by bit, by hitches and starts she edged up the beach, the engine roaring and then straining, the rope squeaking, everyone hollering and splashing in the puddles and lugging planks and rollers up the beach when she spit them out behind her and laying them down in front. Once in a while a roller would get canted so she started to go off to one side and you had to belt it with a maul to get it straight. A maul is a sledgehammer. You learn a lot of new words doing this kind of work. It was a warm day for November and no one minded getting our feet wet. We finally teased her into the shed and left her on the rollers – just nailed them to the planks – all ready for spring, Jerry said. It was really some fun getting that big, heavy boat up the shore. You can do most anything with a pry and a tackle. And we had a good crowd. It was one o’clock by this time and Jerry asked me and Jock in to dinner. We didn’t have to get dressed up. We just washed up and went. Jerry is a funny guy. He says at Thanksgiving he has to eat so much leftover turkey at other people’s houses he doesn’t want any in his, so we had a big hunk of string meat. He cooked it himself. I don’t know what happened to his wife. He lives alone and Alice goes to college in Portland and got home late the night before. Anyway, it was real good. We watched the football game on TV in the afternoon. It’s so easy when the pros do it. They seem to have plenty of time to pass, and when they run, the holes just open up ahead of time – or else they don’t and they get belted. At the half we went out and tossed a ball around. That Alice has a good arm. After the game we got into a big argument. Jock said the Warren Paper Company ought to be prohibited from stinking up the whole coast with their paper mill in Westbrook. You can smell it here when the wind is right, and it does stink. “Don’t knock it,” said Alice. “That is the smell of men working, of money being made, of kids getting enough to eat.” Well we chewed it over for an hour about the expense of it and the higher cost of paper and if you could make it cheaper in the South and what would happen if the mill shut down. That got us to the Bath Iron Works, which was pretty close to home because Jock’s father works there and competition with the South is bad for them. Alice asked, “Who needs frigates, anyway?” and that started something so big we broke it up and I went back to the dorm. It was still pretty silent. I found some peanut butter and crackers and a Hershey bar and a coke that Sam had stashed in the closet and I ate them and tried to think of what to be thankful for and who really to be thankful to except you and Ma, but I had to give up and read a lousy magazine and went to bed. Well, Friday I didn’t do much. I wandered down to the shore and found Jerry and Alice cleaning up, coiling up the ropes and hanging stuff from the boat on nails on the wall. We squirted the hose on the sails and some on each other to wash off the salt and when they were dry, put them in bags and hung them up. We put the mast on a rack so it would lie straight. When we got all done, we barred the big doors and went out through the little door and Jerry snapped the padlock and said, “summer’s done.” Then we went up to their house and had a glass of milk and a sandwich. In the afternoon I saw Cap going into the shop with a bureau drawer in his hand. He is Cap Milliken who is the head of maintenance, and he is quite a guy. He can fix anything. He used to be a head rigger at the Iron Works. I followed him into the shop. The drawer was all in pieces on the bench and he was making a new side, which had to fit the front, the back, and the bottom. It looked like quite a tricky job, so I watched. I didn’t have anything to do anyway except to write that paper on being thankful.

It had got cloudy and dark outside and cold, and it was warm in the shop and smelled good. While Cap worked he told me how he had come to Maine and how he had worked in a garage. He went to Maine Maritime and went to sea as a third mate for a while and quit and went to work on an oil rig in Oklahoma and did a lot of other things until he landed up at the Iron Works as a rigger. One day the kids here at school hoisted some ladies’ underwear up the flagpole and it got all twisted up so nobody could get it down. One of the Trustees, who works at the Iron Works got Cap to come and climb the pole and fix the ropes. While he was here, he wandered down to the boathouse and saw Coach Whitmore looking at a crack in a shell. He helped fix it and took on the job of rigger for the crew in his spare time and learned to coach the younger kids. The next year he was hired as a maintenance man. He also runs a string of lobster traps out of Small Point in the summer. He lives on the school grounds in the old house that used to belong to the foreman at the shipyard when they built ships in the cove. Whatever Cap does, he does on the run. Well, he was making a new side to the drawer. I leaned against the bench and watched him and he told me some of the things he had done, like when he and another guy in Oklahoma stole a wooden cigar store Indian looking fierce and holding a hatchet over his head and set it up just inside the door of the boarding house on Saturday night. When one of the guys came home quite drunk and opened the door and saw that Indian ready to crown him, he nearly dropped dead. Anyway, Cap is a real good carpenter. He cut dovetails in the edge of the side to fit the old ones in the front and when he got done trimming them up and niggling off a little here and there with a chisel and sanding off the rough places, they all slid together so you could hardly see where the joints came. “Now,” he said, “we’ll put the glue to her.” He has interesting ways of talking like “Why, this old chisel ain’t felt the stone since Moses first shaved.” He asked what I was doing Saturday, and I said nothing except I had a paper to write about being thankful and I couldn’t think of anything to be thankful for so he said why don’t you wait a day and see if you don’t find something to be thankful for, and while you’re waiting come up on the hill over the ice pond and help me cut some firewood? So I said I would. Friday night I didn’t have anything to do so I went and played cribbage with Alice. Saturday was a cold day, cloudy, and the wind was roaring and rattling the bare trees. The leaves are all gone now and the river was gray and streaky with lighter gray white caps. Cap came by the dorm in his pick-up truck. In the back he had a chain saw, a buck saw, a couple of axes, cans of gas and oil and other stuff. We drove up a wood road, just two tracks. He said there used to be three: two for the wheels and one in the middle for the horse. He cranked up the chain saw. It made an awful horrible loud noise. He wears plugs that look like earphones. That saw sure cut the wood, though. He cut about six trees, one right after the other. He took out a pie-shaped piece close to the ground and then a back cut behind it and she came down with a swish and a crash. TIMBER!! I haggled off the small limbs with an axe and he cut them up with the bucksaw. I didn’t do very well and he picked up the axe and felt the edge. “That’s dull as a hoe. You could ride a-straddle that to Boston and she’d never gall you.” He edged her up with a round stone he had in his pocket. We stacked the brush and I took the chain saw and he showed me how not to cut my leg off. It’s a fierce tool. You have to keep sharpening it with a file. It’s surprising how much time he takes sharpening tools. I put on the ears and cut the trees into about 4-foot lengths and hove them into the truck. We made a pretty big hole in the woods by lunchtime. We didn’t go home to lunch. Cap had brought a thermos bottle of coffee and some sandwiches and we ate that. He says peanut butter is the staff of life. Also he says it keeps you from getting seasick. It sets up down there like cement and you can’t get sick. After lunch we did some more. I cut a pretty big tree and it didn’t come all the way down but the top got caught in the next tree. I started to cut a piece off the bottom because it was all I could get at, but before I cut all the way through, the saw jammed and I couldn’t get it in or out. Cap said I had an old widowmaker. He took the big axe and backed off and chopped hard at the tree right near the saw. If you hit

too close to the saw and hit it, you wreck both the axe and the saw. A big chip flew out. He hit it again in exactly the same place; another chip flew out and the saw came clear. Then two chops from underneath and the piece broke off and the tree dropped and fell over toward us but we dodged it. That’s why they call it a widowmaker. About then I heard something moving in the leaves under a big, thick spruce tree. Cap said it couldn’t be a deer because the chain saw would scare a deer as far as Fundy, wherever that is. Squirrel, maybe, he said. Anyway, we finished up, stacked the last of the brush, picked up our tools and left. It gets dark here about 4 o’clock. On the way home in the truck in the almost-dark we saw old Benson walking along the wood road with a knapsack. He didn’t want a ride. He was just out for the walk. We got back to Cap’s house in the black dark, “Blacker than the Egyptian darkness,” whatever that is, and hove out the wood. It made a real good pile in the yard. “There’s some burning there,” he said. “Lots of stored up summer sunshine in that pile.” He asked me in to supper. His wife made lobster stew, with lots of lobster. “One lobster, one stew” she said. She meant one lobster for each person. She is like him but a little person and just as fast on her feet. They have quite a lot of books in their house. They even have a bookcase in the kitchen where we ate. There is a fireplace there too, left over from the old days. After supper we talked a while and I started to walk back to the dorm. It was awful dark and cold and quiet. It was like King Tut’s tomb without King Tut. All of the dorms that are usually all lighted up were black and quiet except there was a light in the art studio. I thought I might as well go over and see what was going on. Well, Alice wasn’t there. Mr. Sanborn, the librarian, was in there all alone making signs for a church fair that was going to be the next day, like WHITE ELEPHANTS, whatever they are, KITCHEN TOOLS, SKATES AND SLEDS, CASHIER, PIES, CAKES AND COOKIES. I didn’t have anything to do so I took a brush and tried to help but I couldn’t do it I made a mess of it. So he showed me how you block it out and allow so much space for each letter and 1½ for M and W and ½ for I and brace your hand on your other arm. I still didn’t do very well, but he said let it stand for a monument to a good try. I was going to do RAGS FOR RUGS but he said it had too many crooked letters so I did EXIT. All of a sudden the lights blinked out and then blinked on again and old Jerry was there, growling like a bear, “Someone is on my turf. Get out of here. Time to quit. Union rules.” He was just kidding of course but it was time to quit so we went over to his house and had cider and cookies and he and Sandy – that’s Sanborn – had a beer. Taped to the mantel were four drawings he had made that day of what he had seen out walking. The best one was of Cap swinging the axe just when he was taking out the second chip. You could see he was hitting it hard and just right. I don’t see how he does it – either of them. Alice was there too. She will probably be an old maid because she isn’t very good looking, and she wears baggy pants and an old shirt, but she is pretty good fun. She is on the ski team. Before we left, Sandy asked if we would come down to the church with him in the morning and help put up the signs. I didn’t want to go to church because I didn’t know what they did or anything, so I said no but Alice said she would and talked me into it, so I went. You never saw such a pile of junk, as there was downstairs in that church. Clothes, dishes, lamps, old tools, everything that no one wanted to be bought by people who thought, “That’s a pretty good platter at that price, and I do like blue china and it might come in handy and anyway I can’t go home without buying something.” So they swapped each other’s junk. We put up the signs and other people were sorting the stuff and having a good time and kidding around. “Look – here’s Amanda’s old lamp again. Who’s going to buy it this time?” There weren’t many men there, but a few and a few boys. Allen Poole was there from K.A. and Jock. When it was church time, I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t see how I could get out either and I wasn’t

very much dressed up, but I borrowed a coat and tie from the sale and we went up. It wasn’t so bad as I thought. Those people really sang loud and the hymns were good. The preacher said faith without good works was dead, and with so many people working on the fair, that made sense. Part of the fair was lunch. It only cost $2 and it was pretty good with beans and ham and lots of those casseroles and coffee and pie. I sat across from a guy who is a doctor in Bath. He went to K.A. long, long ago, 20 years at least, and he remembered old Dr. Oswald and knew a lot about the old days when Captain Kenniston used to build ships in the cove and take ice to New York. The women in Maine laugh a lot and they are mostly all big, not fat, just big and they kid around a lot. Maine people talk funny too. My coffee cup was half empty and a lady came up behind me with a pitcher of hot coffee and said, “You want it het up or hove out?” I didn’t know what she was saying at first. Well, it was a good fair. They were raising money for missionaries in Africa that were supposed to be bringing the light to the heathen, but they were also digging wells and it seemed to me an even better idea to be bringing water to the thirsty. Besides, everyone seemed to be having a good time. I didn’t think church could be that much fun. We had to leave early because Alice had to get back to Portland and Sanborn had to cover his dorm. When I got back, it was dark but the lights in the dorm windows were on and the cars kept coming up the drive bringing more guys back. I stopped in the Common Room to watch TV with the guys and then went up to my room and just listened to the radios and the yelling and the running up and down and the shower going. Sam came in and gave me a hard time for eating up his crackers and Coke but he didn’t mean anything by it. We had a decent dinner in the dining hall at last. Then I remembered the English paper. Well, the hell with it. I can’t do it. So I decided to write to you first and now it is too late. I guess I owe you more than I owe the English department.

Love,

Joe