Everyone around us laughed.
“But—”
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said. “We can use the side door.”
With a final glance at his watch, Benjamin turned and made his way through the crowd. Neither of us said a word until we had crossed Kirkland Yard.
“Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?” Benjamin fumed, looking back at the dispersing crowd. “A perfectly good door we can’t even use.”
When the clock tower sounded three successive gongs, indicating the start of first period, we dropped any pretense of not being in a hurry and broke into a sprint. I trailed Benjamin, his backpack flopping from side to side to exaggerate his already awkward run. The squeak of our tread over polished floors echoed down the empty hall. I watched the agonizingly slow increment of room numbers, and just beyond, through opaque glass, the silhouettes of students sitting straight-postured at their desks.
We arrived at the classroom just as the teacher was closing the door.
“In a rush to learn about European history, are we?” he asked.
“—watch was … off by … eight minutes—” Benjamin said, out of breath.
“—couldn’t go through … Senior’s Door—” I added.
The teacher opened the door and with a grand sweep of his hand, beckoned us inside. “You’ve come to the right place, gentlemen. Please be seated. All I ask is that in the future you be more punctual, now that your watch is properly set and you know which door to use.”
We took our seats at the back of the room.
“Most of you probably came here expecting to find Mr. Donaldson,” the teacher said from the front of the class. “But apparently living on an island didn’t appeal to him. So instead of Mr. Donaldson, you have me, Mr. O’Leary, ready to amaze you with the trivialities of history in, of all places, the shadow of a lighthouse.
“I’ve spent the past six years at Wheaton, so I’m afraid my knowledge of Wellington doesn’t extend much farther than the football field, where you have defeated us more years than any Wheaton alumni would ever admit. So I’m teaching at a school I know nothing about, which, as a history teacher, makes my skin crawl. So before we begin, I would be most grateful if someone could share a few facts, or rumors for that matter, about Wellington Academy.”
“Yes,” Mr. O’Leary said, calling on a raised hand.
“It’s been around forever. Both my father and grandfather went here.”
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Nathan Holmes.”
“Nathan, you’re in a history class. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific than forever. As I recall from the headmaster’s speech, last year was the centennial—”
“Raker Lighthouse is even older,” Benjamin blurted out without raising his hand. “It’s a Rhode Island historical landmark.”
“You talk like a native,” Mr. O’Leary said, not seeming to mind the interruption.
“Born and raised in Providence. Home of the Friars.”
Mr. O’Leary smiled. “Not to mention its share of longshoremen. Anyone else have something to add? No? Well let’s see what Wellington: One Hundred Years in the Making has to say,” he said, opening a book on his desk. “‘Founded in 1880 when Dr. Richard Kirkland, Eastbridge’s general practitioner, turned his two-story farmhouse into a boarding school. The school was originally called Seven Oaks, a name derived from the seven oak trees in the rear of the Kirkland house. As Dr. Kirkland’s reputation for teaching grew, fathers from as far as Hartford sent their sons off to study “in the country” at Seven Oaks.’
“Sounds quintessential Americana to me, wouldn’t you say? Who wrote this, anyway?” he asked, turning the book over. “Daniel Shard. I wonder what makes him such an expert. Ian Helding scribed the history of Wheaton. I actually know Ian quite well. He’s a good man. An honest man. But for some reason, he chose to leave out those football games against Wellington that were over by halftime. He didn’t lie about it; he simply chose not to include it. That doesn’t make it wrong, does it?
“I wonder if there’s anything glossed over in here,” he said, flipping through the pages. “Perhaps a few embarrassing losses that go unmentioned? Not to deceive, of course, but merely to maintain the dignity of one’s alma mater? Certainly there’s no harm in that, is there? Who wants to read about the bad times when there are so many good things to cherish? But if certain events are edited, perhaps even omitted altogether, how much trust can we put in the printed word?”
He placed the book back on his desk.
“How much unofficial history do you think there is in the events that shaped Europe over the past three hundred years? Do we place our trust in Napoleon’s memoirs, written from exile at St. Helena, which glorifies war and his attempt to unite Europe? Or do we listen to the grieving widows and mothers, weeping over a generation of Europe’s lost sons?”
Mr. O’Leary sauntered toward the back of the class, stopping beside my desk.
“Who writes history, anyway? As Carl von Clausewitz so aptly penned, ‘history has been written by the victors.’ Not by the vanquished, not by the downtrodden. Nations, like individuals, are quite capable of living in denial. Patriotism to a nation is pride to the individual.”
Mr. O’Leary’s gaze swept the classroom. “Patriotism is pride, multiplied by the millions of her citizens. An event that threatens either can easily be forgotten, whether by the historian, or the conscience.”
When his gaze met mine, I lowered my eyes.
“Did France achieve glory, or atrocity?” Mr. O’Leary asked, returning to the front of the class. “There was no holocaust, no extermination of a race to give us an easy answer. Or, some have argued, was it merely a by-product of the Revolution? Better to die on the battlefield than by the guillotine. But was France’s glory worth all the lives lost? And how much of Europe still bears the scars?”
Mr. O’Leary let this settle in.
“It is my job to present the facts. It is your job to decipher them. There will be no fence-sitters in my classroom. To not have an opinion is to not be informed. What lies behind the pages of Wellington’s history? Was Napoleon a genius, or a madman? Or both?
“So, let’s get started, shall we?”
* * * * *
I silently gave thanks to Perry, my father’s chauffeur, for teaching me the contents of a basic toolset. It had been Perry who had driven me to Miskapaug to board the ferry for my first day at Wellington. His dark, steady gaze in the rearview mirror was ingrained in my earliest memories. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything but driving down the road, bobbing his bald head to his favorite jazz beat, which, as he told me once during a rare conversation, was what he had been doing some fifteen years earlier while rushing my expectant mother to the hospital. According to Perry, I had come within minutes of being born in the limo’s backseat to John Coltrane’s He Beeped When He Shoulda Bopped.
“Congratulations, you’re my ace,” Max said when I correctly identified a socket wrench. “When I got my head in the gears and call out a tool, I want it in my hand. You two are my grunts,” he said, turning to Chris and Roland. “You’re going to replace every inch of this guardrail, top to bottom. That’s right, Bellringer,” he said, getting in Chris’ face. “We’ll see what you think of this tower after marching up and down these stairs all afternoon. It’ll make your whippin’ feel like a day in the park.
“Off with those ties,” Max told us. “They’ll just get in your way. That’s it, let ‘em loose. Roll up your sleeves while you’re at it. Let your arms breathe.” Max led by example, the sleeves of his flannel rolled up to the elbow. “Now use those wrenches like I showed you,” he instructed when Chris and Roland had joined us at the tower’s peak. A fresh toothpick dangled from his lips, his reddish hair and graying sideburns dulled to the same rusted color of the surrounding ironwork. “Those joints are corroded, so they’ll be stubborn. If they don’t budge, you’ll have to jolt ‘em loose with a hammer.”
Only when Chris and Roland had twisted and hammered till they were red in the face did Max emerge from the clock’s gears, take up the wrench, and with a mighty heave that made his forearms bulge, twisted the joint loose. “Once you’ve got this apart, take it to the maintenance shed and put it behind the tarmac next to those tires I showed ya. Then bring up the new, as much as you can carry.”
Then Max was back beneath the gears, occasionally calling out for a tool, only emerging to watch Roland and Chris make the final, arduous steps. He did little to conceal his enjoyment at watching the sons of a governor and a four-star general do his dirty work. For two hours that afternoon, the entire class structure was reversed. Despite spending the previous eight years in the governor’s mansion, Chris was forced to do the bidding of a lowly maintenance man in the narrow heights of a malfunctioning clock tower.
Max had the clock synchronized to the bell (“Iron Lungs,” as we had begun to call it) the following morning, which meant that the leisurely hours of handing him tools were over. He rejoined his team renovating Bowers and Buchanan Hall, leaving me to haul guardrail alongside Chris and Roland on those afternoons when I wasn’t trying my best to fit in on the football field.
Despite being a perennial contender for the All Saints’ Sword—the Round Table Conference’s championship trophy—Wellington had been removed from athletic competition after announcing it would transfer its campus to Raker Island. The field’s poor condition and lack of facilities were as much a deciding factor as the island itself. Because the decision to transfer hadn’t occurred until late spring, the nearby independent schools had already filled their fall schedules, leaving Wellington without athletic competition for the first time since Dr. Kirkland had taught there. The nail in the coffin had been when the athletic director resigned, taking with him the invaluable connections he carried around in his back pocket.
But football was so ingrained in Wellington that an intramural league was established, with the four halls competing against one another. This might have worked better had the hall assignments not determined the football squads. Patterson Hall housed the defensive secondary, Buchanan and Kirkland the offensive and defensive lines respectively, leaving Bowers Hall with the offensive backfield. As a result, Saturdays’ games were perhaps the most lopsided in the school’s history.
A confusion of white and blue jerseys collided before veering toward open field—or in our case—fairway. Wellington’s football field occupied what used to be the resort’s golf course, the end zones hedged between a dried-up water hole and the swell of the fourteenth green. Despite the invasion of knee-high prairie grass, the landscape had a manicured consistency. The hills looked strategically dropped into place, the rise and fall of the land guided by man’s hand. Coach Thurman barked orders from the sidelines in attempt to dredge up some semblance of organization to the adolescent mob that careened across the field.
Having participated in only two practices, I spent most of the game watching Buchanan Hall’s high-powered offense steamroll down the field. By the time I subbed in for our strong safety, William Foster, who twisted his ankle late in the third quarter, I found myself amidst a frustrated defense playing a game that had already been lost.
When the ball was hiked, Roger Elsner, Wellington’s all-conference left guard, broke through the line on a post-pattern. Since he was no longer able to push around two hundred and fifty pound nose tackles, Roger was trying his hands out as wide receiver. And for a big guy, he was surprisingly quick. He snatched the ball from the air, stiff-armed Hawkins to the ground, and barreled in my direction. Roger’s game-face—clenched teeth accentuated by a guttural yell—filled my vision. My feet froze in place, conveying to the world that I was a non-combatant mistakenly placed on the field of battle.
Roger ran straight at me. Was he aiming for me? He looked like he was aiming for me, and I doubted I could have avoided him if I turned and ran into the end zone that I was supposed to be defending at all cost, as Coach Thurman had bellowed at his defensive squad in an ironclad voice that never dropped below a shout. The inevitable bone-crunching collision somehow ended with me draped across Roger’s shoulders, the end zone jolting up and down as we thundered unchallenged down the field. As the strength left my arms, I slid down to cling to his waist. My legs, sensing danger was near, came to life and lifted free of Roger’s cleats that stamped and churned the ground below.
I still maintained my grip even after he eased into the end zone. When his teammates rushed him, I was caught up in the fray, the only blue jersey among the white, feeling foolish and celebratory at the same time. I even exchanged a high-five before scurrying back to the Patterson sideline.
Coach Thurman, confusing my avoidance of getting trampled as determination to make the tackle, kept me in for the rest of the game. My legs were still fresh when the ball was thrown deep, and I went after it at a full sprint. My teammate, Loosy-Goosy and I were guarding the receiver, and when I jumped for the ball, we collided in midair. The only memory I have of those split seconds was hearing a brittle snap rise above the cheering crowd, ringing in my head long after the play ended. After they took Loosy-Goosy off the field, ashen-faced and screaming, I felt the collective stare of Patterson Hall all the way back to the locker room.
My fears were confirmed Monday morning when John Bixley, Patterson’s nose tackle, shoved me into the wall on the way to geometry. “You listen good, Hawthorne,” he said, his big hand pinning my head to the wood veneer. “From now on, every practice is gonna be living hell. You hear me? Living hell. We’re gonna hit you harder than you’ve ever been hit. All of us from the old school got your number.”
I wasn’t aware I had a bloody nose until Mr. Haverty stopped in the middle of proving the Pythagorean Theorem. “Jacob, are you bleeding?”
My hand went to my nose, which was sticky with blood. “Oh, it’s nothing. I get these all the time.”
“Well, go clean yourself up. And don’t dawdle in the halls.”
I proceeded to Buchanan Hall’s lavatory and pressed a paper towel to my nose. With my head tilted back, a message on one of the stall doors caught my eye.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is not squeezing hard enough.
I surprised myself by laughing. Still smiling, I removed the blood-splotched paper towel from my nose and threw it in the trash. On the way out, I stopped to examine myself in the mirror. My reflection looked tired, maybe even a little scared, but the bleeding had stopped. I went to the window. It felt unusual to be there, alone, in my own private space, away from the group, with nothing in the halls but silence. For the first time since setting foot on Raker Island, Wellington felt far away.
I looked out at the empty courtyard, trying not to think of the hazing stories that circulated through the school. Nicknames were prevalent at Wellington, but Charles Patterson, also known as Loosy-Goosy whenever he was out of earshot, was the name that kept running through my mind. What he lacked in physical stature, he compensated for in authority. From his spacious room at the end of the hall, he frequently abused his position as Patterson Hall’s prefect by granting favors to his friends, and reporting insignificant infractions to those who crossed him. But in the face of authority, particularly around the headmaster, Charles Patterson would go all “loosy-goosy”, like the air had been sucked out of him. It wasn’t a coincidence that he lived in Patterson Hall. According to Derek, Loosy-Goosy’s father was the owner of one of the largest Macintosh apple orchards in Maine and had given Wellington such a large endowment that it would have been rude if they hadn’t named one of the dorms after him.
Later that evening, when I saw his slender arm in a cast—a much bulkier object than was ever intended for his delicate body—I knew that the days of flying beneath his radar were over.
* * * * *
“My name is Andre Chen and I’m from Hong Kong. I have been to twenty-two countries, four c
ontinents and six states in the U.S. My favorites are Madagascar, Asia and Utah. My favorite animal is the chameleon because it changes colors and its eyes maneuver independently of one another. The chameleon is indigenous to Madagascar.”
Andre Chen stood at the head of Mr. O’Leary’s class looking more like a kid-brother than someone my own age. Despite his appearance, something predatory lurked in his quiet demeanor that made me uneasy. He spoke without inhibition and already seemed to know exactly what he wanted out of life.
“I collect coins. My favorite is ancient Rome’s Silver Denarius. I always carry it with me.” He patted his shirt pocket. “I’ve never seen a snowfall. I get carsick, but not airsick or seasick. I have a twin sister who is nothing like me.”
No acne marred his face, no puberty cracked his voice, yet his mind and personality had developed, leaving his body leagues behind. More than once Andre spoke in conflicting voices, stating an adult ambition only to follow it with a childlike admission. “I’m going to be an inventor, like a modern-day Benjamin Franklin, whose accomplishments will be used to improve our quality of life. My favorite character in Star Wars is Chewbacca.”
Mr. O’Leary started his class each morning with a student sharing their “history”. He left it to our discretion what we considered this to be—trivial or profound, whimsical or traumatic—as long as it shed light on some past event.
Instead of looking slovenly or unkempt, Mr. O’Leary’s beard—brown with a hint of early gray—further refined his appearance into that of a dignified gentleman, or perhaps more appropriately, a distinguished scholar. It gave him the roundness of maturity that his otherwise sharp-edged features and decisive gaze did not possess. Watching him tug at the edges of his beard while deep in thought, it became apparent that he struggled with concepts just as we struggled, and that even his great mind occasionally failed to grasp the meaning of some complexity.
The Keeper of Dawn Page 3