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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK66 Jack Fritscherproportions that for almost a week the south end of the table had only potatoes and dessert cookies while the north, who always marched into the refectory first from chapel, hoarded the meat and bread and vegetables and milk. Gunn heard about the feud when the leader of the south stabbed the leader of the north in the hand with a fork. From then on, Gunn himself ate alone, standing on a raised podium in all his Marine Corps presence, keeping watch that all the food started with a different seminarian each day, traveling clockwise, seconds returned counterclockwise, hardly ever making it a third of the way back.Of the twenty-nine tables, we high-school seniors sat farthest from Gunn%u2019s platform, exemplars to the younger juniors, sophomores, and freshmen of Absolute Silence, while a priest read to us, over the clatter of silverware on china, from the Lives of the Saints and from spiritual books like Thomas Merton%u2019s Seven-Story Mountain and The Life and Death of Maria Gorretti, the newly canonized Italian saint who at eleven, no, it%u2019s a sin, had been killed by her rapist, Allessandro Serenelli.We ate seven hundred meals September to June listening to the readings in silence, except for Saturday and Sunday nights, and lunch on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays when we were encouraged to practice the social graces we%u2019d need living in our future parish rectories with other priests.At silent meals, after saying grace, the last boy to be served that day was allowed to call, in the sign language of food, his tablemates%u2019 portions. When we could speak, boys announced, %u201cFair share is two scoops of the noodles and whatever the meat in it is.%u201d A miscall meant his starvation. If he were cunning, he could call a fair-share portion small enough to insure that he received a double share before the counterclockwise return. Noodles were hard to capture in two scoops, but hungry boys created tricks like loading a tablespoon with a balanced stack of eight apricot halves while suctioning an extra bonus half onto the bottom of the spoon. Hank invented that, and Porky perfected it.Gunn, always knocking the corners off, realized how his carefully planned seating arrangements threw mismatched boys together. Inevitably Hank sat across from me, sometimes with Ski and a few of the joy boys from the farm crew, or worse, the elegant boys from the choir, glee club, and opera society who ran around singing snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan like they were always starring in Misery%u2019s all-boy version of The Mikado.%u201cThere%u2019s a new prof coming next year,%u201d Hank the Tank said. %u201cPeter told me.%u201d%u201cWe%u2019ll have him for history.%u201d Ski ate like a Clydesdale horse.