by Gail Rock
We all adored Miss Thompson. She was young and beautiful, and it was obvious to us that she was the best teacher in the school. She had also been our teacher the previous year in fifth grade. That had been her first teaching job, and she had liked us so much she had requested to move to the sixth grade with us the next year. Though it was unusual, the principal approved. This had won her our loyalty for life, but it didn’t really make us behave a whole lot better.
She was most appreciative when Carla Mae and I took her our arrangement. I had designed a particularly artistic card with a turkey on it, and it read, “To Miss Thompson for Thanksgiving, from Adelaide Mills and Carla Mae Carter.” Miss Thompson showed it to the whole class and announced that Carla Mae and I were both obviously very artistic, which is just what we wanted to hear. Creepy Billy Wild called me a teacher’s pet, and I made the ugliest face I knew at him.
That morning in school we were going to get started on one of our class Thanksgiving projects. We had gone to the grocery store on Main Street and bought a big roll of white butcher paper, which we taped all along one side of the wall, covering the blackboard. Miss Thompson had selected the four best artists in the class—Billy, Carla Mae, Tanya Smithers and me—and we would draw a huge cornucopia with all kinds of food spilling out of it, and a scene of Pilgrims and Indians eating the first Thanksgiving dinner. Then the whole class would participate in painting the mural with watercolors.
While the rest of the class worked on other art assignments, Carla Mae, Billy, Tanya and I set to work drawing the cornucopia. Billy had brought a Burpee’s seed catalogue from home, and he suggested we use it to get ideas for drawing the fruits and vegetables.
“That’s cheating!” said Tanya.
“Oh, it is not,” I replied. “All great artists use models to draw from.”
“Well, I think we should freehand everything,” sniffed Tanya.
“Well, what do you know?” asked Carla Mae. “Addie is the best artist in the class.”
“Come on,” said Billy impatiently. “Tanya can draw freehand, and the rest of us will use the catalogue.”
Carla Mae and I set ourselves the task of drawing some bumpy squash out of the Burpee’s catalogue, and Billy was doing a pineapple from a picture he had clipped out of the Saturday Evening Post.
Tanya came over and looked at our squash drawings.
“Ugly,” she pronounced, in her best snobbish style.
“Well, squash are part of nature’s bounty too,” I said coldly.
“Oh, Tanya,” said Carla Mae. “You’re just jealous because all you can draw freehand are autumn leaves and apples. Admit it and draw from the catalogue like the rest of us.”
Tanya stuck her nose in the air and went down to the other end of the mural and freehanded a few autumn leaves drifting around the side of the cornucopia.
None of us liked Tanya very well. She was always taking dancing lessons, and showing off about how talented she was. She was very snobbish because her father had a lot of money. He owned the big gravel pits at the edge of town and my father worked for Mr. Smithers, loading the gravel trucks with his big crane. When Tanya wanted to be really snobbish, she would hint about how her father was my father’s boss and made a lot more money. We still were pals though, because Clear River was such a small town that you had to be more or less friends with everyone, otherwise there weren’t enough people to go around. But I definitely considered Tanya my worst friend in the sixth grade.
We worked on our drawing for a while, then Miss Thompson called us all back to our seats for English period. In history period we had been studying the first Thanksgiving, and we had all been assigned to write essays on what we thought the Pilgrims had meant Thanksgiving to symbolize.
Miss Thompson called on Tanya first. “It symbolizes giving thanks,” Tanya answered.
Everybody snickered at that, and Miss Thompson smiled.
“Well, yes, Tanya, but that’s fairly obvious. Can anyone else take it further?”
“They were thankful for their bountiful harvest,” I answered.
“Yes, Addie. And what else? Billy?”
“They were thankful because they made friends with the Indians.”
“Yes,” said Miss Thompson. “They had made friends with some of the Indians. And can anyone tell me how the first Thanksgiving itself contributed to the friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians?”
“The Pilgrims invited the Indians to dinner,” Carla Mae answered. “And the Indians were glad to have a lot to eat.”
“Yes,” said Miss Thompson. “The Pilgrims did invite the Indians, but let’s not forget that the Indians taught the Pilgrims how to raise a lot of their crops and trap the game, or the Pilgrims would have gone hungry. What did they hope to accomplish, then, by inviting the Indians to dinner?”
“They wanted to be better friends with them,” said Billy.
“Right,” said Miss Thompson. “They wanted to strengthen their friendship, and they invited some of the Indians who were their enemies so they would become friends and share each other’s food and culture. So you see, Thanksgiving also symbolizes friendship.”
“You mean we should invite our enemies to Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked.
Miss Thompson smiled. “Why, yes, I suppose that might be a good way of building a friendship with them.”
The class went on with the discussion, but I never heard the rest of it. I was still thinking about what Miss Thompson had said … inviting enemies to dinner. I had a terrific idea.
Chapter Five
That night at dinner, I was careful to keep my elbows off the table and pass the butter before I was asked. I even sat up straight in my chair instead of slouching and squirming, which my dad probably thought was a miracle, but he did not comment on it.
This was all calculated to put him in a good mood after dinner, at which time I would approach him with my latest brilliant idea. I came up with a brilliant idea every now and then. They seldom impressed my father.
My most recent brainstorm had been to string a pulley clothesline between Carla Mae’s house and ours so we could send messages back and forth on it. We didn’t have a telephone in the house because Grandma said it was just a newfangled gadget and that if it rang, she would just have to answer it. I. tried to explain that answering it was the whole idea, but got nowhere. Besides, Dad never spent any money that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He figured that if somebody wanted to tell us something, they could darn well come right out and do it face to face, or write a letter where you could see it all set down in words. So we didn’t have a telephone, or a pulley clothesline, to any of our frequently called upon neighbors.
This resulted in a lot of tramping back and forth by Carla Mae and me until we had worn an ugly path across the lawn between our two houses. We were told to use the sidewalk, but we never did. Carla Mae’s mother and my grandmother, both being avid gardeners, decided they would thwart this path-making by planting a row of hedges between the two houses. Rather than diverting us to the sidewalk and saving the lawn, this only challenged us to newer and greater heights—literally.
Now, instead of simply walking across the lawn, we ran and leaped across the hedge, landing with a thud on the other side. And now, instead of a mere trail across the lawn, there were great bare spots on either side of the hedge, where we took off and landed. The higher the hedge got, the harder we ran and the longer we leaped, so the lawn became more and more scarred. In the winter, we couldn’t get a very speedy takeoff in the deep snow and often brushed the top of the hedge on the way over, breaking off brittle little branches, much to the dismay of Grandma and Mrs. Carter.
They had finally given up and left the hedge and the trail and the two bare spots, and just tried to look the other way. For that reason, I think Grandma had been almost in favor of my clothesline pulley idea, but Dad said it would make us look like a tenement in New York City, and that was the end of that. That defeat had come only a few weeks ago, but I figured he had
forgotten about it by now, and I was ready to try my latest brilliant idea on him.
After dinner, when Grandma and I had finished the dishes, I got Dad to play checkers with me. He would often play games with me, and the thing I liked best was that he never pretended to lose. I hated it when grownups would “let” you win at games, because I always wanted to try and win on my own. Once in a while I could win from Dad, but not very often.
He sat in his big chair in the living room, and I sat on the floor, and we put the checkerboard between us on his footstool. Grandma sat in her rocker, doing some mending.
We always gathered in the living room after dinner, and usually Dad would read his paper and sometimes turn on the radio, and Grandma and I would busy ourselves with our own projects, trying not to disturb him. The big chair was always his, and if anyone else sat in it while he was out of the room, he would glare when he returned, and that person would jump up as if Dad were Papa Bear discovering Goldilocks. Grandma liked her old rocker, and that left me the prickly horsehair sofa with the crocheted doilies. That was fine with me, since I liked to spread out at whatever I was doing. Often I would end up on the floor, using the rag rug as my base. If things got too boring, I busied myself trying to count all the different fabrics braided into the rug. I once got to seventy-eight and lost track. I don’t think I ever did finish it.
“Who’s coming to our house for Thanksgiving?” I asked, as Dad studied his next move on the checkerboard.
“You know who’s coming,” Grandma said, looking at me quizzically. “Uncle Will and Aunt Nora and little Henry.”
“Little Henry!” I said, making my worst face. “Yuck!”
“Now, stop that,” said Grandma. “He’s your own flesh and blood!”
“Can’t we have people who aren’t related to us?” I said, trying to be casual. “Like the Pilgrims invited the Indians?”
“Afraid we don’t know any Indians,” Dad said, laughing at his own awful joke.
I gave him a disgusted look. “I mean we could invite an enemy and make him into a friend.”
“We don’t have any enemies, Addie,” said Grandma.
“Dad does,” I said quietly, peeking at him to see his reaction.
“Who’s that?” he asked, distracted by the move I had just made.
“Well,” I said, “maybe he wouldn’t be your enemy if we invited him to our Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Who?” he asked again.
“Mr. Rehnquist.”
He looked up, startled. “Where did you ever get a nutty idea like that? I wouldn’t let him into the yard, let alone into the house!”
I plunged ahead with the speech I had prepared. “Miss Thompson said that Thanksgiving symbolizes friendship, and I just thought that it would be nice to have him here …”
“Well, think again before you come up with another damn fool idea like that!” he shouted.
“James!” said Grandma.
“Miss Thompson said …” I went on.
“I don’t give a damn what Miss Thompson said!”
“James!” said Grandma again. “Your language!”
“That man cheated me out of hard-earned money,” my father shouted, “And my daughter wants to invite him here to dinner!”
“But Miss Thompson said that Thanksgiving …”
“Tell Miss Thompson to have him for dinner then,” he shouted. “Boiled! And don’t you ever mention the name Rehnquist to me again!”
He had made a dumb move while he was busy yelling at me, so I reached over and jumped three of his checkers and got one of mine into the king row. He took one look at what I had done and got up out of his chair.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” he said angrily, and left the room.
I looked at Grandma, and she just gave me a sympathetic smile and shook her head silently as if to say, “You should know better by now.”
She was right. It was silly to have tried something that imaginative on Dad. I pondered it while I put the checkers away. I was thinking about Marble Cake too, and I got another brilliant idea. I would spring this one on Carla Mae. She was usually a lot more receptive to my brilliant ideas than Dad was.
Chapter Six
The next day in school, I plotted just the right moment to approach Carla Mae. I decided I would try her when we were working on the mural again at the end of the day. First we had to rehearse our special Thanksgiving radio play, which we would do for the grade school assembly the next day.
Several of us had done research in our history books about the first Thanksgiving, and had written the play together. When we were ready, the actors took their places behind a folding screen at the front of the classroom. Our “director,” Joseph Tilton, sat back there with us, sound effects ready.
I was cast as Betsy, a Pilgrim woman; Cora Sue was Mrs. Carver; Jimmy Walsh was Deacon Carver; Billy Wild was Squanto the Indian and Tom Matthews had a dual role as the announcer and a sailor. When we were ready, Miss Thompson went to the old radio sitting on her desk and pretended to turn it on. As she tuned it in, we began our “broadcast”:
ANNOUNCER (in deep resonant voice): “From the heart of the busy metropolis of Clear River, Nebraska, crossroads of the world, we bring you (dramatically) ‘Great Moments in History’! Today—‘The First Thanksgiving.’ The year is 1620; the place, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Joseph then made sound effects of a storm at sea by doing his impression of the wind whistling and by jiggling a big piece of cardboard to imitate thunder. That sent the class into a fit of giggles, and Miss Thompson had to quiet them down so we could get on with our broadcast.
BETSY (sounding sick): “Oh … this Mayflower is a terrible ship! I’ve been seasick for months! Where’s your husband, Mrs. Carver?”
MRS. CARVER: “The Deacon is over there by the rail, praying for land.”
SAILOR: “Land Ho!”
MRS. CARVER: “His prayers have been answered!”
BETSY: “Oh, look! What a beautiful cape!”
MRS. CARVER: “And what a lot of cod there are in the water!”
BETSY: “Why don’t we call it Cape Cod?”
MRS. CARVER: “Husband, how can we get ashore without getting wet?”
DEACON: “We can step out on that rock there. It looks pretty solid.”
BETSY: “I think we should call it Plymouth Rock, after us, the Plymouth Company!”
DEACON: “Look, some of the natives have come to greet us!”
Joseph pounded on a tom-tom for the appropriate sound effects.
SQUANTO: “Greetings. My name is Squanto. I learned to speak your language from your English brothers who came here many moons ago. I will help you to plant corn, and catch fish and trap beavers.”
DEACON: “We were afraid the Indians would be our enemies.”
SQUANTO: “I will show you how to make them your friends.”
ANNOUNCER (deep voice): “One year later …”
DEACON: “Wife, it’s one year since we landed at Plymouth Rock. Our crops have been bountiful. I think we should have a harvest festival.”
MRS. CARVER: “Good husband, we women will bake corn bread and make puddings. We’ll roast some ducks and have shellfish and wild berries. And let’s play some of our games from England.”
DEACON: “And we will give thanks to God.”
BETSY: “I think we should call it Thanksgiving.”
DEACON: “Good idea, Betsy. And I think we should invite Squanto and all the other Indians. Now I must go and shoot some turkeys.”
Joseph then smacked a wood slat on the table top to imitate gunshots, and we all gobbled and croaked like shot turkeys. This created an uproar in the classroom, and it took Miss Thompson a few moments to restore order.
ANNOUNCER: “A few days later …”
DEACON: “Let us drink to Squanto and our other Indian friends and hope that this Thanksgiving will be celebrated for years to come, and always will be a symbol of friendship to the world.”
ANNOUNCER: “Tune in again next month for another exciting chapter from (dramatically) ‘Great Moments in History’!”
The class applauded wildly, and we all stepped out from behind the screen and took our bows. Miss Thompson assured us that the whole assembly would like it equally well, and sent us off to work on the mural.
We were ready to start drawing the dinner scene with the Pilgrims and Indians.
“You do the women and the kids, and I’ll do the men and the Indians,” Billy Wild said to Carla Mae and Tanya and me.
“Why?” I asked, puzzled.
“Because you’re girls,” he answered smugly.
“Why should we paint women and kids just because we’re girls?” I asked angrily. “Maybe we want to paint the Indians.”
“Oh, Addie, I don’t care,” said Carla Mae, trying to avoid an argument.
“Well, I care!” I said, indignant. “If we’re going to divide it up that way, why don’t we get an Indian to paint the Indians and a … a turkey to paint the turkeys?”
“You’re always starting an argument,” said Billy, “and always trying to do boys’ things!”
“Painting Indians is not a boys’ thing!” I answered. “It’s a painter’s thing!”
Finally Miss Thompson intervened and simply divided the mural in half, and sent Tanya to work with Billy, while Carla Mae and I did the other half. As soon as the others were out of earshot, I got ready to present my brilliant idea to Carla Mae.
“Who’s coming to your house for Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked her.
“Nobody,” she said, then laughed. “We’re all going to my grandmother’s house. She’s having the whole family.”
“Good!” I said. “Then she won’t mind one more.”
“Who?” Carla Mae asked.
“I just got a terrific idea. You invite Mr. Rehnquist to have Thanksgiving dinner with you.”
“Are you stark raving mad?” Carla Mae asked, looking at me incredulously.
“You know what Miss Thompson said about turning enemies into friends if you invite them to Thanksgiving dinner?”
