The Wednesday Wars

by Gary D. Schmidt

  "Can I help?" said Mrs. Sidman.

  Mrs. Baker nodded.

  "And then I'll take Holling to my office so that you can be alone."

  Mrs. Baker looked at me, and I knew she wasn't going to send me to Mrs. Sidman's office so that she could be alone. You don't send someone away who has lit a candle with you.

  "I suppose not," said Mrs. Baker.

  Mrs. Sidman took the envelope, then held out the opened telegram to Mrs. Baker.

  But Mrs. Baker closed her eyes. "Read it," she whispered.

  Mrs. Sidman looked at me, then down at the telegram. Then she read the first line: "Sweet eyes ... stop."

  Think of the sound you make when you let go after holding your breath for a very, very long time. Think of the gladdest sounds you know: the sound of dawn on the first day of spring break, the sound of a bottle of Coke opening, the sound of a crowd cheering in your ears because you're coming down to the last part of a race—and you're ahead. Think of the sound of water over stones in a cold stream, and the sound of wind through green trees on a late May afternoon in Central Park. Think of the sound of a bus coming into the station carrying someone you love.

  Then put all those together.

  And they would be nothing compared to the sound that Mrs. Baker made that day from somewhere deep inside that had almost given up, when she heard the first line of that telegram.

  Then she started to hiccup, and to cry, and to laugh, and Mrs. Sidman put the telegram down, held Mrs. Baker in her arms, nodded to me, and took her out of the classroom for a drink of water.

  And I know I shouldn't have, but I picked up the telegram and read the rest. Here is what it said:

  SWEET EYES STOP OUT OF JUNGLE STOP OK STOP HOME IN TIME FOR STRAWBERRIES STOP LOVE TY STOP

  Shakespeare couldn't write any better than that.

  June

  Mrs. Baker hated camping.

  You could tell this because her eyes rolled whenever the subject came up—which was plenty lately, since that's what her class was going to do to celebrate the end of the school year. Two nights of camping up in the Catskill Mountains. Beside a waterfall. In deep woods.

  "On soggy ground," said Mrs. Baker.

  "It'll be great," said Danny.

  "With mosquitoes," said Mrs. Baker.

  "Mosquitoes?" said Meryl Lee.

  "Sleeping on rocks," said Mrs. Baker.

  "Terrific," I said.

  "Dew all over us," said Mrs. Baker.

  "Great," said Doug Swieteck.

  "Let's get back to sentence diagramming," said Mrs. Baker.

  You might wonder why Mrs. Baker was going to take us camping when she thought that camping meant soggy ground, mosquitoes, sleeping on rocks, and dew. But every year since she had first begun to teach at Camillo Junior High, Mrs. Baker had taken her class camping in June. Lieutenant Baker had come along—probably because he loved camping, and Mrs. Baker was willing to put up with soggy ground, mosquitoes, sleeping on rocks, and dew for his sake. Maybe she wanted to go this year because he would have wanted to go. Maybe she thought that if she kept every routine the same, then he really would be home in time for strawberries.

  So Mrs. Baker was taking us camping, even though she hated camping.

  But let me tell you, Mrs. Baker would have had to hate camping a whole lot more to keep herself from smiling through all of her classes—even when she was rolling her eyes or crossing her arms or fussing that Mr. Vendleri had still not gotten all the spilled cider mopped up, so that it was sticky on the feet when you walked into the Coat Room.

  She was still smiling anyway, because Lieutenant Baker was coming home.

  It was in all the papers. Even Walter Cronkite talked about it on the 6:30 news. How Lieutenant Baker's helicopter was shot down. How he jumped out before the helicopter hit the ground and shattered. How his leg was caught by one of the broken blades. How he hid in the jungle near Khesanh trying to keep his wound clean and eating chocolate bars from his pack. How he followed a river until he couldn't go any further. How he was found by a woman who already had two sons killed and didn't want anyone else to die, so she took him back to her house. How he hid there for three months until an American helicopter came over and he signaled. And how the crew pulled him out.

  It was, said Walter Cronkite, a miraculous rescue.

  I guess it's like Prospero pulling back the curtain for the king and there's Prince Ferdinand, who the king thought was dead, playing chess with Miranda like he was on vacation. Or maybe, a little like a phone call late at night from your sister, who isn't all that interested in finding herself anymore. She just wants to find you.

  So Mrs. Baker was smiling because no one can help smiling at miracles.

  The camping trip was going to be on Thursday and Friday of the second week of June. Everything before that, said Mrs. Baker, would be work. Work like we had never known work. Work that would make us drop. Work that would make us beg for mercy.

  It was hard to worry too much about this since she was smiling the whole time she said it. But she really did work us like we had never been worked before. Sentence diagramming, short stories by John Steinbeck, the spelling and construction of adverbs and adjectives with Latinate endings, declining strong verbs, more short stories by John Steinbeck—who wrote a whole lot of short stories—and an essay report on any three poems written before 1900 —because Mrs. Baker thought that no one had written any poems worth writing about since then.

  All this in two weeks. And that doesn't count Mr. Petrelli's "Westward Expansion and You" report. Or Mr. Samowitz's pre-algebra final examination.

  And it didn't count Much Ado About Nothing, which should have counted for the whole shebang, since it advertised itself as a comedy—but let me tell you, it wasn't.

  "Of course it's not always funny," said Mrs. Baker. "Why would you ever imagine that a comedy has to be funny?"

  "Mrs. Baker, if it's a comedy, it's supposed to be funny. That's what comedies are."

  "No, Holling," said Mrs. Baker. "Comedies are much more than funny." And she smiled again.

  Whatever it was supposed to be much more than, Much Ado About Nothing wasn't funny. Maybe a line or two here and there, but other than that, pretty much not funny. I mean, talk about jerks. Claudio and Hero—Shakespeare wasn't all that good about his names—Claudio and Hero would have a whole lot to do just to get up to where Romeo and Juliet were. First they're in love, then they're not in love, and Hero has to pretend to die (Does this sound familiar? Don't you think Shakespeare needed some new material?), and Claudio has to pine away at her tomb, and then Hero has to come back to life, and then they fall in love again just like that. Really.

  Can you believe this stuff?

  Because you don't have to be Shakespeare to know that's not the way it happens in the real world. In the real world, people fall out of love little by little, not all at once. They stop looking at each other. They stop talking. They stop serving lima beans. After Walter Cronkite is finished, one of them goes for a ride in a Ford Mustang, and the other goes upstairs to the bedroom. And there is a lot of quiet in the house. And late at night, the sounds of sadness creep underneath the bedroom doors and along the dark halls.

  That's the way it is in the real world.

  It's not always smiles. Sometimes the real world is like Hamlet. A little scared. Unsure. A little angry. Wishing that you could fix something that you can't fix. Hoping that maybe the something would fix itself, but thinking that hoping that way is stupid.

  And sometimes the real world is more like Bobby Kennedy, who was a sure bet for the Democratic nomination and probably would have been president of the United States and stopped the war, but who got shot at point-blank range.

  After she heard the news, my sister locked herself in her bedroom. She put on the Beatles singing "Eleanor Rigby" and played it over and over and over again, low, so that I could just barely hear it through her door.

  I knocked after something like the fiftieth repetition. "Hea
ther?"

  No answer. The song started over.

  I knocked again, but she turned up the volume, and the Beatles sang about all the lonely people and wondered where they all came from. As if we didn't know.

  But I kept knocking, until finally the music stopped, and the door jerked open, and it looked for a moment like my sister was going to take my head off. But she didn't. Behind her, the Beatles sang of Father McKenzie, walking away with the dirt of a grave on his hands.

  I took Heather's hand, and we left the house together.

  We walked to Saint Adelbert's. We waited on a long line to light two candles, and though we both were crying—everyone was crying—we kept holding each other's hands, and we said the same prayer.

  But it's not always miracles—as if we didn't know that, too.

  Bobby Kennedy died the next morning.

  We heard it together on the transistor radio, Heather and me. She cried, and I held her, gut-crying, not knowing what at all to do except to be together. And if I hadn't heard that Lieutenant Baker was going to come home and that some miracles stand a chance of being real, I think I might have given up on the whole Presbyterian thing right then, sort of like Julius Caesar giving up on Brutus and going ahead and dying.

  Early the next Thursday morning, a bus pulled up to take Mrs. Baker's class to the Catskill Mountains. We taunted the other seventh graders going on into their classrooms. Then there was running onto the bus to pick out our seats, and a lot of running back out to help load the hot dogs and buns and chili and water bottles and juice-powder mix and marshmallows and more marshmallows and loaves of bread and wool blankets for everyone and extra wool blankets for just in case, and then running onto the bus again to make sure that no one had stolen our seats, and then running out again to go to the bathroom one more time, since the only bathrooms where we were going had branches on them. It took Mrs. Baker and Mr. Vendleri and even Mrs. Sidman—who was coming along with us to lend Mrs. Baker moral support, she said—to get us finally herded onto the bus. Then it bumped into gear, and we were out onto Lee Avenue.

  We sang as we drove to the Long Island Expressway. We got to Old Miss O'Leary taking a lantern to her shed, and the flea on the fly on the hair on the wart on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea, and the bullfrog stubbing his toe and falling in the water. When we reached the Throgs Neck Bridge, Doug Swieteck started "One Thousand Bottles of Beer on the Wall," until Mrs. Baker came down the bus aisle and didn't need to say anything. She had her arms crossed.

  A very ominous beginning.

  After an hour, the bus went from the highway to the Thruway, then—an hour later—off a sharp exit to a two-lane road, then to a gravel road, and then to a dirt road. Finally, we ended up on a two-track path that the bus could never have gotten out of if the path didn't double back on itself. When we reached the end of that—and let me tell you, this took a while—we climbed out and Mrs. Sidman tried to keep us corralled together as Mrs. Baker issued a pack to each of us.

  The pack Mrs. Baker gave Danny was full of cans of chili—which weighed enough to make Danny stop smiling pretty quickly.

  The pack she gave me held four cans of chili—big cans of chili—and all the utensils. "If something happens to this pack," she said when she hefted it onto my shoulders, "we're all going to eat with our fingers."

  "What could happen?" I said.

  "That is probably what Hero's father was thinking after the wedding date was set," she said.

  Which, if you haven't read Much Ado About Nothing lately, was Mrs. Baker's way of saying that a whole lot could happen.

  In small groups we followed Mrs. Baker onto a path that went mostly uphill while jutting up as many tree roots as it could to trip us. It wasn't too long before we were all stretched out, a long and straggling line that got longer and stragglier the farther we went.

  Still, it was a June day to be blithe and bonny in. The leaves up in the hills still had that fresh color they have when they're just a couple of weeks old, and they give off that green smell that mixes so well with sunshine in June. A few big billows of clouds floated ahead of us. We could see them piled up when the maples thinned out to birches, carried on winds that were way too high to reach us below the trees. Top branches rubbed together now and then, their creaking and cracking the only sound we heard except for the group up ahead that was singing about Napoleon's army of fifty thousand men climbing up a hillside. They probably weren't carrying hefty cans of chili.

  I was the very last person on the path. And let me tell you, after a while that bugged me. It wasn't that I was alone. Mrs. Sidman walked in front of me, picking up sweatshirts and canteens that hadn't been tied to the packs very well, and handing them to Danny and Meryl Lee when her arms got too full. But you put all the utensils for an entire class in one pack, and four big cans of chili, and you're carrying quite a bit, and that's going to slow you down. And it was an old pack, and it smelled old. I had to keep hefting it back up around my shoulders because the straps wouldn't hold tight, and every time I did that, another fork or knife found a way to poke into my spine. And when you have to do that while you're climbing mostly uphill, and the straps of your backpack are cutting grooves into your shoulders, and Doug Swieteck is carrying a pack filled with bags of marshmallows, you don't get in the best of moods—even if it is a June day off from school.

  The path heaved in short, quick spurts up through some stands of old birches, and then out into more sunlit spaces. We crossed some open rock, and since it had become much warmer, I was glad when the clouds hid the sun and dropped the temperature. Then we climbed into some scrub pines, where the wind came on and cooled our backs. Even my pack began to feel a whole lot lighter, and the forks and knives had stopped jabbing into me whenever I hefted it up again.

  It was past noon by the time our group got into camp, and I have to say, Mrs. Baker had picked a great spot—though probably Lieutenant Baker had picked it out years before. An egg-shaped clearing beneath high pines rounded out a bend in a running stream. A waterfall on one side threw its water over mossy stones and into a small, deep pool; on the other side we set our camp. The ground was not soggy, and there were no mosquitoes and not too many rocks, which I pointed out to Mrs. Baker.

  "Just wait," she said.

  Mrs. Baker organized the whole site. She gave Doug Swieteck a camp shovel and had him dig out a fire pit. I lined it with stones from the streambed. Mai Thi and Danny built a teepee fire, and Mrs. Baker put two large pots for chili beside it. Mrs. Sidman took everyone else to search for wood, and she organized what was brought back into a pile that slouched from the biggest logs to the smallest twigs. Then Mrs. Baker marked out the sleeping places with long branches—the girls on one side of the fire, the boys on the other—and she and Mrs. Sidman set up a big tent in between while everyone picked spots to lay out their sleeping bags.

  After the tent was up, Mrs. Baker waved at Danny and me. "The chili," she called, and we brought our packs and dropped them beside her. Meryl Lee filled a fry pan with hot dogs and slid it on a grill over the fire. They began to sizzle right away.

  You had to hand it to Mrs. Baker. For someone who hated camping, she knew exactly what to do. She even had latrines built in the woods, and she posted signs shaped like little hands with GENTLEMEN and GENTLEWOMEN written on them pointing to two thin paths that led away from each other. While the hot dogs cooked, I followed the path from the GENTLEMEN sign down a sharp ridge, over a dry streambed, up another ridge, and behind a boulder the size of Camillo Junior High. It was peaceful and comfortable. Doug Swieteck had used his camp shovel to dig a hole in the middle of some bright green vines, and he had set three rolls of toilet paper on three dead branches of a tree beside the hole. The vines that ran up the trees almost covered them. He left a shovel in the pile of dirt—to use as needed.

  It was the kind of place where you could sit for a while within the vines and watch the green world be green.

  Then Mrs. Sidm
an hollered, "Holling Hoodhood!"

  You already know what had happened, don't you?

  Let me tell you, it wasn't my fault that Mrs. Baker had given me an old pack. And it wasn't my fault that its seams were starting to split. And when you're hiking up a path that's pretty steep and hefting an old pack onto your shoulders, you don't feel stuff falling out.

  "You didn't notice it was getting lighter?" said Mrs. Sidman.

  "Well," I said, "I did notice it wasn't getting any heavier."

  She held up a spoon. "This is our entire set of utensils," she said.

  "We can stir the chili," I said.

  "The can opener was in your pack, too," said Mrs. Sidman.

  Mrs. Baker picked up four cans and handed two to me. "Come with me, Holling." We went down to the streambed. "Look for some large stones that are sharp at one end," she said.

  And that's how we got the cans of chili opened. We smashed into them with rocks, which is what I think people did during the Westward Expansion. At first, the cans just bent over and started to collapse into themselves, but after a few blows they split open, and chili spattered out. By the time Mrs. Baker and I were done, we looked liked someone had thrown a whole can over us both.

  But from the way Mrs. Baker was laughing, you couldn't tell that anything was wrong.

  Or that she hated camping.

  Mrs. Sidman was grumbling more than a little by the time we got back, and it didn't help much that she cut up the ends of three of her fingers trying to get all the chili out of the battered cans, which were pretty jagged. Every time she cut one, she would glare at me, and I don't think she was thinking thoughts about nurturing one of her students in wisdom and learning.

  Any lunch after a long hike tastes good. Especially if it's on a day off from school. And if you take two hot dogs and hold them together, one in each hand, you can scoop up the chili between them, and shovel it all up to your mouth. If you lean way over while you do this, most of it won't even drip onto you—which is something that Mrs. Sidman didn't seem to understand.