One evening on our way back from an afternoon of hunting partridge, I told Prof the “Bad Boy and the Battle-ax” story. A few days earlier I’d expressed to him my frustration over not finding suitable literary subjects for my students to write about. “Well, maybe the old Battle-ax was on to something,” he said. “Try getting the kids to write about what they know, as she put it. Their own experiences. Then you can nudge them along to write about the books they’re reading.”
Prof had thick white hair parted in the middle, like a headmaster from the 1930s. He wore large, square, horn-rimmed glasses perched low on the bridge of his bulbous two-quart-a-day nose. At six feet three (his boys, Big and Little, were an inch or so taller) and with the build of an NFL linebacker, he’d been a standout, three-sport high school and college athlete. His proudest moment was scoring fifty points for Orleans High in a basketball game decades ago. He still officiated at local high school games.
Prof’s uniform was an old-fashioned double-breasted suit, a wide, multicolored necktie (in an era of dark, narrow ties), and wingtip shoes. He used Old Spice shaving lotion, which, like the three or four packs of clove-scented gum he chewed every school day, diluted, without entirely masking, the beery redolence that enveloped him and his immediate surroundings after ten o’clock each morning. He had a voice like the foghorn of a Great Lakes steamer and never spoke at a normal level when he could shout. He was spontaneously generous. He genuinely liked and understood kids, pretended to be mad more often than he really was (which was often enough), and—the bottom line—always supported his teachers. That is to say, he could and frequently did holler at us, but he brooked no criticism of his staff or beloved school from anyone else, including the school board members. “Old school” was how he accurately described himself. He’d taught three generations of Orleans students and was, in his own eyes and those of nearly everyone else in town, an icon.
Prof’s wise advice to encourage my students to write about their own experiences didn’t register with me immediately because, good old Kingdom boy that he was, he drank Scotch out of a flask while he road-hunted, and he carried his double-barreled Remington twelve-gauge business end up on the floor between us, on half-cock at all times. That very afternoon, after what Prof had confided was another three-quart day, we were riding the back lanes looking for partridges dusting themselves, when a grouse flew up into a wild apple tree. Prof frantically reached for the loaded gun, brought the barrel sharply up into my chin, yanked the car off the road under the apple tree, jumped out, and missed the bird by a mile.
“Welcome to the Kingdom, sweetie,” Phillis said when I got home. “I’m glad he didn’t shoot you.”
Teaching may be principally a matter of faith. First you must have faith that what you’re doing will make a difference. Then you need to have faith in your students. Finally, there’s the little matter of faith in yourself. As a first-year teacher at Orleans High School, mine was beginning to evaporate. How was I going to coax, cajole, threaten, or otherwise elicit some written work from my students? Maybe Prof was right. My students might enjoy writing about their own experiences. But what did they know well enough to write about? What were their stories?
On the morning after my hunting mishap, I loosened my necktie, rubbed my black-and-blue chin, and told my seniors that a writer I admired once remarked that the story people want most to read is one they’ve never read before. I let this sink in for a moment, then said that the one story they could write that no one had ever read was their own. Almost everybody, I continued, had a unique story to tell. I was interested in reading theirs.
It would be gratifying to report that the kids went straight home and wrote stunningly original autobiographical essays, won all kinds of writing awards, and received full-freight scholarships to Ivy League colleges. Nothing of the sort happened. Still, I persisted. In school and out, I spent hours talking with my students and, maybe more important, listening to them, trying to help them discover their stories. It was a glacially slow process. Ironically, I was probably the main beneficiary of my students’ memoirs when they did begin to trickle in. After all, I was the spy in their midst, looking for stories to write myself. To this day I clearly remember three extraordinary essays and the kids who wrote them. I’ll call them Ethan, Becca, and Cody—the young hero who borrowed my car on the first day of school.
Like Cody, Ethan detested school, a sentiment I readily understood. The Bad Boy of Chichester had detested school too, for the same reason as Ethan, who longed to spend all day, every day, hunting and fishing. How Ethan had gotten to be a senior I couldn’t imagine. Still, I liked him and wanted him to graduate and “stay out of the mill.” Therefore, we worked out a deal. Once a week he’d hand in a composition about fishing. We’d go over it together, and if he happened to reveal the whereabouts of a few of his secret trout brooks, that wouldn’t hurt his grade either.
Three days later, Ethan produced a twenty-page opus on angling for rainbow trout at the falls on the Willoughby River, where Phillis and I had marveled at the leaping fish on our first evening in the Kingdom. It was a terrific story. Ernest Hemingway would have enjoyed it. I could see those hefty, crimson-sided trout jumping the falls, see Ethan carefully drawing a bead on them, hear the rushing water and the sudden, splitting crack of his .270 deer rifle as he fired down into the cataract. The next week he composed a spirited panegyric on the art of spearing wall-eyed pike with a trident made from a hay fork. Brook trout were next on the agenda, a fifty-page epic that made me want to grab my fly rod and head out for the streams on the spot.
At the end of the brook trout essay, Ethan appended this succinct message: “Dear Mr. Mosher, so long, gone fishing, yours, Ethan.”