by Tobias Wolff
Fat chance. I wanted out of there, and I was confiding nothing. I’d let Gershon think the worst of me before I would claim any connection to him, or implicate myself in the fate that had beached him in this room. Why would I want to talk my way into his unlucky tribe? All this came over me as a gathering sense of suffocation. I stammered out a final apology and left, taking the stairs at a run as soon as the door clicked shut behind me.
It had been different that morning with Dean Makepeace, calmer and clearer. I simply decided that it would be better not to use the Jewish defense. There was no obvious reason for being cagey. In my short time at the school I’d seen no bullying or manifest contempt of that kind, and never did. Yet it seemed to me that the Jewish boys, even the popular ones, even the athletes, had a subtly charged field around them, an air of apartness. And somehow the feeling must have settled in me that this apartness did not emanate from the boys themselves, from any quality or wish of their own, but from the school—as if some guardian spirit, indifferent to their personal worth, had risen from the fields and walkways and weathered stone to breathe that apartness upon them.
This was no more than a tremor of apprehension, and though I acted on it I did not allow it to occupy my thoughts. But it never really deserted me. It became a shadow on my faith in the school. Much as I wanted to believe in its egalitarian vision of itself, I never dared put it to the test.
Other boys must have felt the same intimations. Maybe that was why so many of them wanted to become writers. Maybe it seemed to them, as it did to me, that to be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.
I hadn’t heard anyone speak of a writer as having power. Truth, yes. Wit, understanding, even courage—but never power. We had talked in class about Pasternak and his troubles, and the long history of Russian writers being imprisoned and killed for not writing as the Party wished. Augustus Caesar had sent our Latin master’s beloved Ovid into exile. And when the progressive Mr. Ramsey—himself a gift from England—wanted to show us what mushrooms we all were, he recalled our nation’s inhospitality to Lolita, which he considered the century’s greatest novel since Ulysses—another victim of churlish American censors!
Yet the effect of all these stories was to make me feel not Caesar’s power, but his fear of Ovid. And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.
ON FIRE
The day before our Frost poems were due we had a fire at the school. Fire was the great nightmare. Early in the century a residential house had burned to the ground with thirteen boys inside, and the shock of those deaths could still be felt in my day. They were known as the Blaine Boys, after the house they lived in. Their group photo, taken for the yearbook they never saw, hung in Blaine Memorial Hall, where we sixth formers gathered for talk and singing after dinner. I was drawn to the picture. I studied their serious faces (no clowning for the camera in those days), their way of sprawling against one another, leaning back to back, one boy resting his head on another’s shoulder. The sense of loss I felt wasn’t just for their lives: how artlessly tender, how easy they were together.
Their housemaster had been drinking in the village when it happened. He left for another boys’ school the next year and then, the story went, drifted to another, and another, never to find rest.
The fire was said to have been started by a cigarette. How anyone could know that, we didn’t ask. It was revealed truth. And it led to a commandment: Thou shalt not smoke. Get caught and you were out; no discussion, no exceptions. Even the softest masters were without mercy on this point. Two or three smokers a year got the boot, given just enough time to pack and call their parents. A boy would return from swimming practice and find his roommate gone, hangers tinkling in an empty closet, the other mattress stripped and doubled over. No announcements were made and no lessons preached. This swift and silent erasure of smokers from the school served grim notice on the rest of us. It was the same fate suffered by thieves and violators of the Honor Code, and smoking was meant to be seen in that light, as a betrayal of us all.
So we had fair warning and plenty of it—in spite of which an unteachable cadre of resolutes, including me, kept smoking anyway. I’d sneaked the occasional gasper since eighth grade but at school it became an obsession. Crazy as I was for cigarettes, my true addiction was to the desperate, all-or-nothing struggle to maintain a habit in the face of unceasing official vigilance. Always on the scout for new venues, I smoked in freezers and storage lockers and steam tunnels. I joined the Classical Music Club so I could smoke in the bathrooms of the concert halls we visited, and went out for cross-country so I could smoke while running in the woods. I kept a store of spearmint Life Savers to mask my breath and used a holder so my fingers wouldn’t stain. It was fretful, laborious work, but when I took that first deep drag I went dizzy with pleasure, not least the pleasure of getting away with it one more time.
Then I almost got caught. I’d been smoking in the basement of the chapel with a boy who was discovered there by the chaplain just minutes after I left. I was putting music in the choir stalls—my chore that week, and my excuse for being there—when the two of them came upstairs and walked down the aisle, the chaplain sad but decided, holding the boy by the elbow, and the boy . . . I could only glance at him and then I looked away, but I saw enough. For the rest of the afternoon my gut clenched at the approach of any master. I was afraid the other boy had given me away, not to save himself—no chance of that—but in a fit of clear-cutting confession, or resentment at my escape. He didn’t, though. He went out the gates alone.
I had seen his face. I knew what was happening to him. He was in free fall, and still trying to believe he was only in a dream of falling. He lived in New York. It would be a long night’s ride for him, on the train, by himself. I could easily see myself on that train. My journey wouldn’t stop in New York, though. I’d have to catch the gritty Century to Chicago, then change to the Great Northern—day after day of rolling past factories and fields and deserts and mountains but seeing none of it, gazing at my own stunned reflection in the glass as every click of the wheels took me farther from school. Lying sleepless in bed that night, I saw my school as if from an impossible distance, heading across the plains in a darkened railway car, back to the melancholy and muddle of life with my father. I pictured the black-beamed dining hall loud with voices. The chapel windows blazing red on winter afternoons. The comradely sound of the glee club practicing, the scrape of skates on the outdoor rink, a certain chair in the library, the deep peace of the library, the faces of my friends. I saw the school as if I’d left it forever, and the thought made me sick at heart. I got up and collected my suicide kit of cigarettes and lighter and holder from their hiding places and went to the bathroom at the end of the hall and stuffed it all into the trash can. I never smoked at school again.
But the temptation was persistent, and sometimes I could almost hear the old crew puffing away in the basements and attics. So my first thought when the sirens came wailing up the drive that Sunday afternoon was that one of those poor fiends had started a fire somewhere, and would pay the price that very hour. Who would it be?
I was coming out of the library. From the top of the steps I could see a thick braid of smoke twisting up over the old field house. Thrill-starved boys poured out of the dorms and halls, with a few masters trying to form them into groups or at least slow them down, all to no effect. I followed, my notebook under my arm.
I had been holed up most of the weekend, trying to finish my poem for the competition. What I’d been working on was a hunter’s elegiac meditation over the body of an elk he’s killed after tracking it for days through the mountains. This wasn’t typical of my poems, abstract and void of narrative as they tended t
o be. It fell into the pattern of a group of my stories in which a young fellow named Sam evaded the civilizing demands of his socialite mother and logger-baron father by fleeing into the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he did much hunting and fishing and laconic romancing with free-spirited women he met on the trail. I had begun this series innocently enough, in unconscious tribute to the Nick Adams stories, but over time it had evolved into something less honest. I wanted to be taken for Sam by my schoolmates, who knew nothing of my life back in Seattle.
But this poem was giving me a headache. For one thing, how was the hunter, having trailed the elk so far into the woods, going to get it out? How big was an elk, anyway? Really big, I guessed—so after offering thanks to the spirit of the elk for giving him all that meat, the hunter was going to look ridiculous walking away with one lousy haunch over his shoulder. Maybe I should’ve made it a regular deer. But deer didn’t have the majesty of elk. There was a lot to fix, and the poem was due the next morning.
The day had turned cold. A storm had blown off the last of the leaves a few nights earlier, and the bare black trees made it seem even colder. I fell in with a younger boy, a fourth former whose recent submission to Troubadour we had not yet rejected, though we probably would. I kept waiting for him to ask about it, but as we approached the fire he got excited and ran ahead without a word on the subject.
The crowd had gathered around the old field house at the near end of the football field. The firemen stood by their truck drinking coffee and taking turns with the hose. No flames were visible, though I could hear the water seethe as it hit the roof. The shingles had burned through here and there, exposing a sheet of charred subroofing that sent up a greasy hiss of smoke as the firemen played the hose over it.
I asked the boy next to me how the fire had started, and without taking his eyes off the field house he mumbled something about Jeff Purcell.
Purcell. The news rattled me because this was my friend, and because he’d invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with his family in Boston, and now I could look forward to nothing better than another stretch with my boring grandfather and his boring wife in a housing development outside Baltimore.
False alarm! It wasn’t my Purcell, Little Jeff, who’d started the fire, it was his cousin. Big Jeff was a vegetarian, the only one in our class, whose love of animals extended to an ugly black rat he somehow kept hidden in his room and carried around at night in a pocket of his dressing gown. Big Jeff would’ve been a figure of fun among us if not for his great friendliness and his trust in everyone else’s goodwill. When you did tease him he didn’t get it, he just looked at you like a puppy wondering why in God’s name you’d tied a can to his tail. Big Jeff was devoted to Purcell. He haunted his room and patiently endured his abuse just to sit in the corner and watch him shave or do push-ups or dress for dinner, and listen to him pronounce his opinions and anathemas. He wasn’t stupid, Big Jeff. He did well in his science classes, and what he cared about, he knew about. He’d made himself an authority on how animals were raised and slaughtered, and as we tucked into our roast beef he spared us no detail as to how it got from the pasture to the plate.
Big Jeff had another passion, and in pursuit of this he almost burned down the old field house. He believed that our destiny was to leave Earth behind and colonize other planets. In our fifth-form year he’d started the Rocket Club, and though he couldn’t find any members in our class—we were too busy licking our chops for a great big bite of this planet—he did manage to recruit a few younger boys out of the Science Fiction Club. On Sunday afternoons the Rocket Club met at the football field under the eye of the chemistry master and shot off whatever they’d cooked up in the lab that week. Big Jeff had been experimenting with a two-stage rocket, but instead of going straight up his missile cut a few loops and crashed into the field house roof, where the explosive booster detonated in a clump of old pine needles and leaves. Whoosh!
I wish they’d kicked him out, Purcell told me that night.
I laughed. I thought he was joking.
We were walking back to our dorm after an editorial meeting. We left the brick path and cut across the grass, which was stiff with frost and rustled under our feet.
I know it sounds terrible, Purcell said, but I do. I wish they’d kicked him out.
Why would they do that? He didn’t break any rules.
Did you see him at dinner tonight? He was doing everything but taking bows, like some kind of celebrity.
He is some kind of celebrity, actually.
Big Jeff. Big Jeff. When I was a baby they actually stuck him in the same crib with me. It’s true. They say you can’t remember that far back but I do. That hound-dog face staring at me, you think I could forget that? Kindergarten—the desk in front of mine. Always fidgeting, always looking for something, always with his hand up. I can still see the light shining through his ears. Grade school, camp, vacations—man, you don’t know what it’s like. Big Jeff and Little Jeff. Whatever college I end up at, he’ll be there, waiting in my room. We’ll probably get buried in the same coffin. Me and Big Jeff. Big Jeff and Little Jeff, ad fucking aeternum.
I started a new poem that night. It was the fire that got me going, that and the firemen in their open rubber coats and high gaping boots, the looks they sneaked at us and the masters and the school itself, pretending to let their glances skate over us but taking it all in. Their curiosity had made me look around too. For a moment I saw this place as I had first seen it: how beautiful it was, and how odd. I felt its seclusion and how we’d come to resemble each other in that seclusion. We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves—tasseled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel—were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths, all this marked us like tribal tattoos.
The firemen looked us over, and we looked them over. Visitors snapped us to attention. There was one fireman in particular I found myself watching. He had tired-looking eyes, and held himself a little apart. He was less covert than the others in sizing us up. I thought about him after they finished and drove away.
That was how I came to write my new poem, a narrative in which I described a fireman the morning after a big blaze. He’s been the hero that night, braving walls of flame to rescue a little girl. Now it’s over. He goes home and it’s Saturday morning and his son is watching TV. He fries himself some eggs but doesn’t eat them. He’s oppressed by the crumbs on the kitchen table, the dirty cereal bowls, the smell of burnt toast and last night’s fish. The television is too loud. Then he’s on his feet and in the living room and he’s just yelled something, he doesn’t know what, and his boy is looking at him with coldness and disdain.
I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t enjoy writing this poem. I did it almost grudgingly, yet in a kind of heat too. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home. It was home: my mother gone; my father, though no fireman, wounded by my disregard as I was appalled by his need; the mess, the noise, the smells, all of it just like our place on a Saturday morning; the sense of time dying drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, right down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.
I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.
FROST
The day after John F. Kennedy won the presidency, George Kellogg won the audience with Robert Frost. Our paper printed his poem in a box on the front page, a dramatic monologue in which an old farmer feels the bite of mortality on the first cold day of autumn. George had used an odd mixture of tones. At one moment the farmer is lyrically drooling over the sight of the hired girl milking a cow:
Old rooster struts the rafter
s while the barncat begs
Mewing at her feet in the stall where Flossie stands,
As with swift hard strokes of her soft white hands
She pulls the foaming cream into the pail between her legs.
Then a few stanzas down he’s a terse fatalist:
Corn’s high in the silo, hay’s stacked in the loft,
Cordwood’s halfway to the roof, doorcracks plugged with clay.
So let come what will, hard ground, short day,
I’ve done all I am able—and after all, the snow is soft.
The poem was entitled, shamelessly, “First Frost.”
In his telephone interview about the poem he’d chosen over all the others, Robert Frost told our reporter: Young Kellogg has had some fun at this old man’s expense, and I guess this old man can stand some fun, if it isn’t too expensive. He said he liked the joke of the milkmaid having soft hands. All the milkmaids I ever had to do with could’ve gone bare-knuckle with Jim Corbett and made him bleed for his purse. Frost suggested that a few winters on a farm wouldn’t hurt any young poet, to learn that snow is no metaphor, if nothing else. But I guess I’ve dipped my bucket there a time or two, and your fellow Kellogg has caught me fair and square.
I was astonished that Frost could’ve read the poem as anything but an act of fawning servility. But no, he seemed to think that George had written some sort of burlesque, that he was using the poet’s manner and material—perhaps his very name—to give him the needle. Frost sounded like a man who’d been stung by a taunt, showing he could take it and come back with some chaff of his own. Still, he’d paid George the ultimate compliment of choosing the poem. How hurt could he be?