by John Smelcer
Dichter exploded in anger. He kicked the water pail across the cement floor and hurled the brown paper bag against a far wall.
“You can stay here and rot for all I care!” he yelled, spitting out the words, his face as red as a brick wall.
“Two more days!” he shrieked as he opened the door to leave. “No one’s ever lasted that long.”
ON THE SEVENTH DAY Noah and Lucy brought Simon his mail, a letter from his grandmother. They slid it through the rectangular opening and waited while Simon read it to himself.
“What does it say?” asked Lucy when Simon was finished.
Simon read it aloud to his friends. The letter said that Simon’s grandfather had died. Simon was silent for long moments. Lucy and Noah knew that their friend was crying. They remembered that his parents were also dead. But then Simon would clear his throat and read again. When he finished, Simon carefully folded the letter, replaced it inside its envelope, and slid it into his shirt.
On the twelfth day, the headmaster received an anonymous letter that someone had slid under his office door the night before. The typed letter purported to be from a teacher and threatened to call the authorities if Simon wasn’t released immediately. Nothing about the letter indicated who might have written it. The letter could have been typed on any of the school’s many typewriters. There were thirty of them in Mr. McDuff’s typing class.
Frustrated that he could not break the obstinate boy, that he could not wrench the stubborn words from him without killing him, and concerned about a police investigation, Dr. Dichter finally set Simon free. By then, Simon’s defiance had become mythic. The story of Lone Fight would be told and retold, whispered like a prayer through the echoing halls of the school for the rest of its existence. Over the years, his name would change, the duration of his imprisonment would vary, the year it happened would be lost, but the myth would endure as all great stories of courage endure.
Chapter Nine
WELLINGTON WASN’T THE BEST PLACE to spend Christmas. The holiday season reminded the children of how much they missed their families. Consequently, the number of students who ran away from school increased considerably as Christmas drew closer. It was a curious and remarkable phenomenon. Dr. Dichter—a man of steadfast habit and predictability, in spite of all appearances, including his ink-black-dyed comb-over to the one side or the other of his broad and usually sweaty head—could track with near precision the December date by the number of runaways, or attempted runaways, reported to him by his staff on a daily basis.
This year would prove no exception.
Two weeks before Christmas, twenty-four Indian children were known to have plotted running away from school. By the next week, the number had nearly doubled. However, by the last few days before Christmas, only a total of twelve students had, indeed, run away. Remarkably, all twelve had been caught and returned and properly punished, their penance painstakingly planned for the rest of the year.
All, that is, except for fifteen year old Lester Black Feather from Oklahoma who had run away and been caught five times in the past two years. Punishing Lester didn’t seem to work; he took his punishment in stride. Instead, the headmaster took to punishing Lester’s younger sister, Anna. Two years younger than Lester, Anna was locked in her room for three days and paddled twice each day, while her disobedient brother was forced to watch. If he looked away, extra paddles were added. The message was clear to every student with a sibling at the school—and there were many: Run away and your brother or sister pays the price.
Punishment of siblings had long been an effective means of control at Wellington. Lester was never the same afterward. For the rest of the school year, he neither spoke openly to anyone nor smiled nor cried. Something inside him ran away for good.
Some say it was pride.
Some say it was hope.
On a dark night during the next year Lester took his own life. The school’s cemetery, old and patient, opened its earthen arms and grinned its teeth of headstones.
NOAH BOYSCOUT wanted to run away, just as he wanted to run away from the wolves back home. He was determined not to spend Christmas at Wellington, only this time he had no rabbits to throw to save himself. He stood staring out his dormitory window all morning, wondering how such a small place—and Wellington really was a small place, only a few dozen acres in all—could be filled with so much sorrow, how so many tears could fall from such a small sky.
But it was dangerous to run away in winter. Noah had heard many terrible stories about Indians who ran away. One of them haunted his dreams. It was a sad and tragic story of four boys who had tried to escape toward home during one particularly harsh winter. The tale was now more legend than fact, its sorrowful telling part of the mortar binding the bricks of the school, and it frightened Noah.
Just after the turn of the century, several teenage boys from a Blackfeet reservation in Montana ran away six days before Christmas. All had been on the track team. One even held the school record for the mile. That week, the hardest blizzard ever to hit the east settled in for the long haul. The winds raged and temperatures plummeted so low that farm animals froze to death in their barns, ponds froze to the bottom, families were imprisoned in their homes, and the ceaseless snows shut down all commerce.
Even the moth-like stars shivered.
Nothing moved across the suffering land save a small group of young Indian boys trudging through dense forests, pressing across unyielding fields toward home, slowed by trepidation and snowdrifts and frostbite.
They were found in a small mining town so near death that all the boys had to have their feet amputated. After months in painful convalescence, they were returned to Wellington, where all of them spent their final years at the school in wheel chairs, running foot races only in their dreams.
Other tragic accounts had circulated around the school, year after decade—some less, some more terrible—like the story of what happened to little Molly Fury, who ran away on Christmas Eve night to find her mother. Molly was so young and so small and it was so dark that she didn’t get far. A search party was sent out on Christmas Day, and they found her a mere three miles away, frozen through and through at the edge of a backcountry road. For many years, students told of seeing her blue-fleshed ghost wandering the school grounds, bits of snow and ice clinging to her hair, her long black dress fluttering in the wind like the dark, flapping wings of a crow.
Elijah had seen her many times, but unlike so many of the other ghosts that haunted the cemetery, she never once tried to speak to him.
Molly Fury was the loneliest ghost at Wellington.
When Noah told Lucy of his desperate plan to run away, she was apprehensive. Everyone at Wellington knew the stories. She thought of a compromise. Instead of Noah running away alone, they would all four run away for Christmas. It wouldn’t really be running away; it would be more like a field trip. Lucy and Noah shared the simple plan with Elijah and Simon. They would sneak away on Christmas Eve night.
But where would they go? This time, Simon had the solution.
“What about that old barn in the field across the highway?” he asked, scratching his shorn head.
They all agreed.
The barn was perfect. It was not too far. They could sneak off to it and return first thing the following morning. Besides, there was something fitting about spending Christmas in a barn. They excitedly formulated their plans during dinner, in between bites of coagulating Salisbury steak, one of the most predictable food items on the dinner menu. They would gather supplies—blankets, matches and candles, food, and gifts—and sneak away after bed check the night before Christmas. They would spend the night in the barn and return Christmas morning.
All four loved the idea. Somehow, just having the plan made them happier, made the tedious days pass quickly. Before they knew it, the day of their temporary escape arrived.
In between breakfast
and lunch on Christmas Eve, Noah and Elijah, seen by no one, noiselessly made their way into the laundry and swiped four dark-blue blankets. They knew that it would be cold in the barn and that the single blanket issued for each room would not be enough. At the same time, more or less, Lucy and Simon crept into the kitchen and took a package of frozen hot dogs and some raw biscuits that had already been rolled out and cut into circles. Lucy swiped a box of matches sitting on one of the large, industrial cooking stoves. At lunch and then again at dinner, each of the friends grabbed an extra apple or banana. They stashed everything in Simon’s room until it was late enough to sneak away. That night, the boys played cards in Simon’s room until it was bedtime, while Lucy lay reading on her bed.
Later that night, after the floor monitors were asleep, Noah, Simon, and Elijah escaped their dormitory, creeping down the flight of stairs without stepping on a single loose floorboard. By then, the boys knew which steps were tattle-tales and which ones could be trusted to keep a secret. No one noticed them crossing the dark lobby except a lone shrew darting across the hardwood floor, vanishing beneath a bookcase in the lobby, and a spider high up in a corner with one long leg resting on its web, waiting for vibrations. Elijah quietly pushed open the window, which he had unlocked during the day. One by one, all three boys tossed out their bundles of bedding and climbed through the opening.
Outside, the treacherous night was in a fit. A blizzard was forecast. Even though the snow had not yet begun, temperatures had dropped all through the day into the teens, and the wind was blowing so hard that large branches were breaking off trees. Already, a heavy branch had fallen onto the headmaster’s new car, denting the roof and shattering the windshield. Dark black clouds hung so low from the sky that they seemed touchable. It hadn’t snowed in over a week, but the ground was hardened by a white crust of old snow. On the walkways, a rind of salt marked thousands of footprints faintly visible crisscrossing the cobbled walkways of the school grounds.
The three friends gathered themselves behind the scraggly bushes beneath the dorm window. Noah looked above him and saw that the window was still open. He quickly stood up to close the window, which at first stuck in the frame and then banged shut. Just then, two security guards walked past the corner of the building, on the sidewalk. They stopped. The guards were close enough that the boys could hear their conversation despite the loud wind.
“Did you hear something?” the shorter man said as he flashed a light toward the dormitory.
The boys held their position behind the wind-quivering bushes, holding their breath, like rabbits making themselves invisible to sniffing dogs and coyotes.
“Just this damn wind,” the taller of the two men said, pulling his cap low over his ears. “Whatya’ get your kid for Christmas?”
“I got him a BB gun and a jack knife. What’d you get for yours?”
The second man had a higher voice.
“I got him one of them electric trains and a new baseball glove.”
Twice more the searching light lit the brick walls near the boys’ hiding place, but eventually the men and their light moved on into the darkness, the boys’ safety restored as the light of the bobbing flashlight diminished. All three boys seemed to begin breathing again at the same time.
Simon was the first to speak.
“Let’s go get Lucy.”
Each picked up his bundle, swung it over a shoulder, and crept against the building, leaning into the stiff wind, ducking beneath each window they passed. At the end of the building, they huddled close, looking in every direction before running across the field toward Lucy’s dormitory.
When she saw her friends crossing the white field, Lucy crawled out the same window she had used before, pulled it closed, and waited.
“You got everything?” Noah asked when he had come beside her.
Lucy nodded, picked up her own dark blue bundle, and turned her coat collar up. Her eyes were already watering from the stinging wind.
“Right here,” she replied eagerly as she swung it over her tiny shoulder.
The quartet of young friends—best friends—worked their way across the campus, through the night, past the cemetery, and under the wrought-iron gates. They crossed the quiet road and pushed across the farmer’s frozen field, their footprints mingling with the small, sharp tracks of deer.
At the far end of the field, the old barn leaned against the darkness, its fading red stain almost beautiful against the thin white snow and the dark clouds tangling themselves in tree branches at the edge of the forest.
The secret dancing place lay about a mile to the east.
When the four friends arrived at the barn, they stood before the dilapidated structure, stunned by its shaggy loneliness. They had never been this close to it, having seen it only from afar. The gabled roof still retained most of its split-shake shingles, but there were a few large holes from missing or rotted shakes. Only one of the small glass windows remained intact; all the rest had been broken. The front door hung loosely, held by a single long-strap hinge. Some of the red-stained planks cladding the outside of the barn were missing, allowing the wind to howl through the spaces like a pack of wolves. The old barn was a picture of decay and ruin.
But at least it wasn’t Wellington.
Elijah pushed open the door, which broke from its remaining hinge and fell heavily to the floor. The inside of the barn didn’t seem as bad as the outside. Only a little snow had filtered in, mostly from the few holes in the roof. There were still piles of old straw in the stables, brown and rotten on the exposed surface. Lucy scooped an armful of the exposed straw and tossed it aside. Underneath, the straw was still golden yellow and dry. There would be plenty for their beds. Noah and Simon looked around for firewood. They found old planks from the walls and flooring, boards from the stables, and old, buckled beams—uprights—which had supported the hay loft. Roof shingles made of cedar were scattered all about. In spite of the cold and darkness, the decay and ruin, the old barn smelled of cedar and straw and of better days gone by.
They prepared for the long, cold night by building great piles of clean straw for bedding, piling up firewood, and leaning the heavy door back into place to keep out the unwelcome wind. They even shored up several of the broken windows with pieces of old plywood, once used to patch a small area of plank flooring in what at one time had apparently been a tack room.
After a while a blazing fire, nestled inside a circle of old foundation stones, lit the inside of the barn, warming it. The four friends sat around the flames roasting hot dogs and telling jokes and scary stories. Later, as the fire dwindled, they talked for hours about home and about Christmases past, taking turns to feed the dying flames.
In the larger scheme of the threatening night, their little fire was a pathetic point of light, and despite their best attempts to seal their little world in the old barn, the cold crept in. But no matter how much the wind tried to wriggle through the cracks or around the tilted door to penetrate their refuge, the night was filled with warmth. For the first time in several months, Noah, Lucy, Elijah, and Simon were happy. They had escaped their captors. In this long-abandoned place they were free.
When it was bedtime, the boys each piled up straw along an interior wall of what had once been a stall. The wall against the outside was fairly solid—only a few small, rotted holes—and the wind didn’t whistle since it was blowing against the other side of the barn. Lucy had discovered a wall box on the other side of the same interior wall, a V-shaped feeding trough attached to the wall by means of nails through the trough’s topmost slat and from below by means of two angled support boards, one at each end, fixed from the outer edge of the trough to the base of the wall. One of the nails was exposed a little, and Lucy could see that its head was square, suggesting its ancient age.
She filled the trough with clean straw and depressed the mass along the center line of the trough, so that the straw looked
not only like a mattress but like a blanket, inviting her into a warm cocoon. Though the feed trough was only a little over four feet long, it fit Lucy just right if she curled her knees slightly.
Curious at all the sound of fuss and arrangement coming from the other side of the wall, the three boys peered around the corner to find Lucy comfortably curled under her blanket in what looked, for all the world, like a high-dollar railroad-car berth. The three boys gathered around their friend, admiring her ingenuity.
“You comfortable, Lucy?” Elijah asked, feeling more and more like a proud older brother.
“Just right,” Lucy replied, snuggling down even further into the pliant straw and beneath her dark-blue blanket.
The three boys winked and smiled at each other, found their own straw piles, and, having piled more wood onto the crackling fire, pulled their own blankets to their noses and waited for sleep to come.
They slept soundly, dreaming happy dreams filled with decorated trees, images of family, and brightly wrapped gifts.
In the early morning, while they slow-roasted biscuits at the ends of sticks held strategically above the fire, the friends exchanged gifts. Each had brought something to give, small pieces of pottery or drawings they had made in art class, something carved in wood shop, or something personal brought from home. The gifts had no monetary worth like a BB gun or an electric train or a jack knife, but they were priceless nonetheless.
When it was Lucy’s turn to pass out gifts, she sat for a long time staring into the fire, holding her biscuit at the end of a stick above the flames. Finally, she spoke.
“My gift is a story my mother used to tell me. It’s the story of how Raven brought light to the world.”
As she began to speak, tears welled up in her eyes, slowly dripped down her cheeks.
The three boys looked away from her face, into the fire, not in shame but in compassion; they felt the hurt in their young friend. Lucy was the youngest of them, and although she had strength belying her age and small size, they knew how much she missed her mother.
