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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 61team painted while Hank%u2019s played basketball until two-thirty when they reversed their positions.During the autumn of my first year, all ninety of us freshman boys alternated playing football and dismantling an old brick house on Misery%u2019s property that had been part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. It was kind of fun and kind of spooky, especially around Halloween, going down into that cellar and feeling the souls of scared black folks running away, escaping, free.We chipped all the white mortar off all the red bricks, and loaded each others%u2019 arms up with six to eight bricks, and carried the bricks a hundred feet to a big truck, and then ran back to be loaded up with more bricks. From the twenty-story bell tower, we must have looked like busy worker ants. In the deepest snows, our lines of boys carrying bricks circled around a big bonfire to keep us warm. By the spring of that freshman year, some of us could carry ten or twelve bricks, balancing them, and running toward the truck.%u201cOra et Labora%u201d was the rule: %u201cPray and Work.%u201d Ora et Labora had been the monastic rule in the Middle Ages. The senior boys warned us snidely that the German translation at Misericordia of %u201cOra et Labora%u201d was %u201cArbeit Macht Frei, Work makes you free.%u201dAt work and at play we were platooned like Gunnie Gunn%u2019s Son-of-aGunn Marines, kept moving and busy as boots. He blew his whistle and signaled us out onto the field, no equipment but the mud and the goal posts and the ball he tossed us. I didn%u2019t like getting knocked around to begin with, but Gunn drilled us all to play because, after we got ordained, one of our main jobs, he said, would be coaching grade-school teams, because athletes made the best recruits for vocations. That seemed reason enough, but I liked it even less my junior season when Hank the Tank kicked out my two front teeth during our big annual Thanksgiving game, %u201cThe Misery Mud Bowl.%u201dIn the fourth quarter, our clothes sucked so wet with mud we could hardly move. Mud caked our faces, twenty of us, our breath heaving out in wet puffs of steam, point, set, hike. I looked up at Hank%u2019s pink hole of a mouth wide open in his face, his big shoulders, back, butt, legs, behemoth rising from the mud, coming toward me in the slow-motion of muck, deliberate, aiming himself, his big boot, toe-first, into my teeth, and in the melee of the play, our side gaining a yard, less than a yard, but gaining, no one noticed that my beautiful teeth, so protected by my mom and dad, shined white, shot white, uprooted, falling from my bruised lips through the mud and blood spitting out of my mouth.