The Boy Who Earned the Campout
Orrin read the load-out list. He read it exactly the way he had read it the week before, in the same flat, quick voice, and when he came to the Fox Patrol he read seven names, and the seventh was Jonah’s.
Nobody looked around. Gunnar Bartel kicked Jonah’s shoe under the table and was told to stop.
At the end, Orrin said he had one thing for the Scoutmaster’s Minute, and it was short. He said that from now on, a boy came off a roster only after the troop committee and the boy’s own folks had talked, and the boy had been asked what he needed. He said Zach Ruddick would put it in the minutes. Then he said the raised fist would replace the whistle on all hikes, because the old signal for halt was a raised fist and he did not know why they had ever stopped using it. He said any boy could ask for a buddy, and he would not ask why.
That was the whole thing. Zach, at the end of the table, wrote for about two minutes in a spiral notebook, and then he looked up and nodded, one time, and that was how the committee voted. There were nine parents in the room. Not one of them made a speech.
I waited in the lot afterward, by the car, in the cold. Zach came out and walked past me, and stopped.
“He didn’t say what happened,” he said. “I’m not going to ask.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“For what it’s worth, Lyle called me. He said he was wrong to say it the way he did. He still thinks Orrin was right to worry.”
In November, at the committee meeting I did not attend, Orrin told them he would hand over the clipboard after the spring Court of Honor. Ross Bartel agreed to take it on. Brett told me about it that night, and said Orrin had not made a speech either. He had said his knees would not do another ten years, and the troop needed somebody who could still run backward up a trail.
I did not take that as a punishment. I do not think he did.
The troop left for Bennett Hollow on Friday at four-thirty, the same patch of lot, the same trailer. The air smelled like leaf smoke from somebody’s burn barrel. Boys hauled duffels and coolers and argued about who had the good tarp.
Jonah shouldered his duffel and crossed the lot. On the trailer, the older boys shifted to make room for him without being told. Tanner Ruddick, the senior patrol leader, sixteen and nearly six feet, fell in beside him. He did not say anything. He slowed by about half a stride until the two of them walked at the same speed.
“Hey, Jonah,” I heard him say. “When you talk, face me. That way I catch all of it.”
“Okay.”
“You’re with me and Gunnar on the ridge.”
“I’m slow.”
“I like looking at stuff,” said Tanner.