The Boy Who Earned the Campout

The scoutmaster waited until the other boys had gone to the trailer. He did not wait until Jonah was out of earshot. He said it ten feet from my son, with the lot lights buzzing on over the First Methodist fellowship hall and a cold wind coming across the soybean stubble behind the grain elevator, and he never lowered his voice.

“Trisha, got a minute?”

It was the third Thursday in October, a quarter past six, and Troop 114 had just finished a gear check before the fall campout. Orrin Gannon stood by the trailer in his tan uniform shirt with the clipboard against his chest. He had been scoutmaster in Maple Hollow, Wisconsin, for 24 years. He had been the assistant scoutmaster when my husband was a boy in that same troop. His voice was built for talking over eleven-year-olds, and it carried right across the grass to where Jonah stood with his sleeping bag rolled under his arm.

“Jonah’s not on the roster for Bennett Hollow,” he said.

I did not understand him at first. I actually smiled.

“He’s on the roster. He turned his money in September.”

“He’s not going.” He looked at the clipboard so he would not have to look at me. “It’s a six mile bluff hike, Trisha. Sandstone steps and loose rock the whole back half. We move at a pace. I can’t have a boy on that trail who’s going to slow the troop down.”

“He’s walked every hike this troop has taken.”

“The short ones.” He cleared his throat. “And with the hearing aid, if I blow the whistle and he doesn’t catch it, that’s on me. I’m not doing that again.”

Again. I let the word go by. I did not know yet what it was attached to.

“Mr. Gannon, Jonah paid $85. He mowed lawns for it since June.”

“The fee covers the food and the campground permit. It’s already spent.”

“Then you’ll give it back.”

“It doesn’t work that way. It’s spent. I’m sorry.”

He did not look sorry. He looked like a man who had decided something at his kitchen table a week ago and was glad to have it said. He tucked the clipboard under his arm and walked back to the trailer, where the boys were passing tents up into it hand to hand, like a bucket line.

My son was still standing there.

Jonah was 12. He had his father’s long jaw and my mother’s habit of going very still when he was hurt. Behind his left ear he wore the tan hearing aid he had worn since a fever took most of the hearing on that side when he was two. Inside his left boot was a hinged plastic brace that ran from his shin to his heel, because his foot had been born turned in and the surgeons at the children’s hospital in Madison had spent three operations turning it back. When he walked fast you could see it, a hitch in the left step and a little drag at the end. In twelve years it had stopped him from nothing he had made up his mind to do.