Page 83 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 71

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.
“Ora et Labora” was the rule: “Pray and Work.” 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 “Ora et
Labora” was “Arbeit Macht Frei, Work makes you free.”
At work and at play we were platooned like Gunnie Gunn’s
Son-of-a-Gunn 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’t 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, “The
Misery Mud Bowl.”
In 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’s 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, rootless, falling from my bruised lips through the mud
and blood spitting out of my mouth.
Afterwards, after the shock, after the blood, after the dentist,
after my permanent dental bridge, after my parents paid a lot of
money, Peter Rimski said, “It sort of makes you feel like a real jock
to be able to brag your teeth were kicked out in a football game.”

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