The Last First Day Read Free Page A

furnishings, was theirs only provisionally, for as long as they remained at Derry.
    Her work in the world had not been equal to Peter’s.
    She knew that, but she had wanted to be of help to him and to the boys. She had wanted, as she had said often to Dr. Wenning, to be of use in the world.
    • • •
    Peter and Ruth had lived and worked at Derry for just over fifty years. In the summer of 1960 when they arrived, Peter was just shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, tall and gangly and all Adam’s apple and kneecaps and hair flopping in his eyes. His first job at the school had been to teach American history.
    The Derry Industrial School, as it was called then, had been founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. Parents who had lost a son to influenza in early childhood had established the school with a bequest to the Maine diocese of the Episcopal Church, and its original purpose had been to educate boys once referred to as unfortunate. The curriculum promised a vocational path, the gift of useful knowledge and practical skills—including the harvesting of lumber—which would arm these boys with a way to make a living in the world.
    For decades, Derry boys had gone into the forest with teams of horses and wagons, learning the art of selecting and felling timber. The practice had been in use still when Ruth and Peter had arrived, and even after bulldozers and mechanical equipment were available, the school continued to use the horse teams, the method thought to be more in keeping with the Derry spirit and its pride in self-reliance and discipline, the nostalgic virtues of manly, robust health.
    In the early years, Ruth and Peter had gone with the boys and the lumbermen who directed them. In winter, bells were hung on the big draft horses’ harnesses, the horses’ warm breath clouding the air. There had been a gravely festive quality to those occasions—thermoses of milky sweet coffee and cheese sandwiches on brown bread supplied—not a celebrationexactly, Ruth had thought, but something significant. Finally, however, it was no longer affordable to timber the land in this way. A company came now to clear-cut a section every few years, and the school depended on the revenue. Ruth missed the old days. She thought she would never forget the sound of the horses’ bells, the trees coming down in the silence of the forest, the great ominous rushing sound and the raw, sour tang in the air. Standing beside Peter in the red hat she’d knitted for herself, Peter wrapped in the red scarf she’d made for him, she had felt deep inside her the collision of tree with earth.
    The language of the school’s mission had changed over the years, of course. The word
unfortunate
could not be used anymore, though as Peter always said, it was the same truth now as it had been one hundred years before that those who were born poor deserved their poverty no more or less than others deserved the silver spoon. But costs had risen steeply, and the trustees were exerting growing pressure on Peter to redirect the school’s focus toward paying students. A capital campaign had begun to transform the beautiful but shabby old brick buildings and to
up-market
, a term Peter disliked, the school’s image. More and more, especially in the last few years, Peter had been left alone to importune privately his own contacts—old friends they were, by now—to raise the money to protect the boys who needed scholarships. His job had become a continual fight for principle and for the funds to sustain that principle, and Ruth had watched him suffer over it.
    Now, after fifty years at the school, nearly forty as headmaster, Peter was, Ruth knew, too much a part of the school’s history to be fired, too well loved by too many. The school’sfinancial future was at present too uncertain for the risk of such change. Yet the uneasy compromise in which Derry now found itself, neither New England prep school for wealthy boys nor home for the indigent, could not