all along.
As I frantically tugged at my hand, it finally released. I looked at it and tried to rub the red stress bruises from both sides of the hand. As I looked for sympathy the teacher strode to the back of the class, where we sat, strap in hand.
“Joe, Jim and Pete,” she commanded, “go and stand behind the curtain at the back of the class and I don’t want to hear a peep out of you.”
Jim, Pete and I got up without saying a word, walked behind the curtain, wearing our rubber boots, which we had not taken off after recess. We stood together as the teacher closed the curtain in front of us.
None of us spoke for a while. Jim then made a brilliant observation.
“Look down,” he said to me and Pete. “What do you see?” There, the curtain hung to a distance of about eight inches above the floor. We were wearing 12-inch boots.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “We can leave our boots here, slide out the side door and play outside. The teacher will still think we’re back here because we’ll leave our boots standing here.”
“Brilliant,” I declared, “but we can’t just run out of here. We have to wait until she’s not looking toward the back of the class.”
“Move over slowly, to the break in the curtains,” Jim directed. We slid over, slowly, in baby steps, until we reached the break in the curtains. Jim peeked out, but the teacher was looking back as she taught the class.
“Wait a minute,” Jim said.
Finally, she got up to write something on the blackboard. “Paul,” we both called. Paul didn’t hear us.
“Paul,” we called again, as loud as we dared. Still, there was no answer.
But, Scott had heard us. He tapped Paul on the shoulder.
“Hey,” Scott whispered, “Jim wants you.” Paul looked back.
“Paul,” Jim said, “let us know when the coast is clear. We’re going to make a run for the side door.”
“Okay,” Paul said.
After a few moments, Paul said the magic word, “Now!”
Jim, Pete and I scrambled through the curtains, slid in our heavy wool socks toward the side door, at the back of the class, reached for the knob, quietly turned it and bolted to freedom. We stood on the porch for a moment, feeling like geniuses for being there. Then, without saying anything, we started playing marbles on the light fluffy snow, which had just fallen on the sidewalk. We played pots that day, shooting from about 1O feet away.
“There’s no ‘ping standers’ in pots,” I declared and for some reason, we all found the statement very funny.
We horsed around there for a few minutes, playing marbles on our knees, kneeling on the back of a little piece of plywood we had found in the ditch nearby. We had removed our wool socks from our feet and put them in our pockets to keep them dry. None of us gave any thought to how silly our accomplishment was.
By now, a buzz had gone through the class. The class members fidgeted excitedly, wondering when the teacher was going to catch on to the ruse.
Finally, someone blurted out, “Miss, I think they’ve stood behind the curtain long enough. It must be stuffy back there. I think you should let them return to their seats.” The class roared with laughter.
The teacher looked up, a look of surprise on her face, as though she had momentarily forgotten about us.
“You can come out now, boys,” she said finally. The boots didn’t move.
“You can come out now, boys,” she repeated. Still, nothing happened.
“I don’t think they can hear you back there,” Paul said, as the teacher started to the back of the class.
The teacher drew back the curtain in one swoop and said loudly, “You can come out now, boys,” but there was no reaction.
Next, the teacher looked inside the closet, saw we weren’t there, noticed the three pairs of boots standing there and asked the class, “Where did they go?”
But she knew. She strode over to the side door, opened it and was amazed to see her three prize students kneeling on the snow-covered sidewalk, playing marbles. She was good about it.
“Was it stuffy back there?” she asked giving us an out. “Yes,” we said, “we needed some fresh air.”
“Okay, boys,” she said, “you better come in fast. Your feet must be frozen.”
We hadn’t even noticed that they were.
“Yes, thank you,” we said as we went back into the classroom to a hero’s welcome.
“Just like scoring a big goal,” I said to Jim.
“Yeah,” he said simply, as we returned to our desks.
V—THE HOCKEY RINK
The big guys had laid down the rule. If you didn’t help build the rink, you couldn’t play on it once it was ready. It was a very cold day in January when the construction started. We got a good start on it from the snow drifts nearby. The big guys would cut blocks out of the snow drifts, using their rubber boots to tramp them out at first, then, cutting them out with pieces of plywood that they found behind the school.
We carried them over to where Don and Tom would lay the blocks in a pattern that would eventually form boards for our hockey rink.
“Keep them straight,” Don called out. “Start at the corners. Don’t get any one spot too high, too soon,” he would call out over and over.
The guys and girls carrying the blocks followed the commands without hesitation. It was cold that first day. The wind was strong enough that it would whip the grains of hard snow from beneath the blocks as we lifted them out. They felt like sandpaper scrubbing at our exposed faces and necks. Jim worked hard, steadily, without complaint, always carrying a large block, or sometimes two of them, setting them into a nice tight corner. He was building up the boards around the perimeter of the rink.
By the end of the first day, the entire wall at one end of the rink was built to a height of four feet and foundation blocks had been laid around the entire perimeter of the rink.
It was not surprising that Jim was helping to build a hockey rink. He had taken to the game at a young age. He first started to skate when his mother Maxine brought him across the road to the rink Frank Renaud had built for his children. Maxine, who had a great mind for sports, put a chair on the ice to steady Jim. At first, he ran on his skates, but within two days, he was outskating some of the older kids. Even as a preschooler, he was tenacious about learning to skate.
Maxine had made a rule early on. You can pick one sport to play. Jim picked hockey. When he came home with a circular from school stating that Essex arena was home to a minor hockey program, Jim was signed in to play the next day. Maxine loved the idea of indoor hockey.
