Thomas Tryon: The Night of the Moonbow

“Maybe it’s Injun smoke,” Tiger said with a straight face, down on his hands and knees now, meticulously pinching up the last bits of glass the broom had overlooked. . “Tiger Abernathy, you’re a caution! Why, you couldn’t find a Injun within a hundred miles of Moonbow Lake. Looks like it’s cornin’ from the old Steelyard place. I just hope nobody’s lightin’ fires over there.”

She watched as Tiger, the smallest boy in the intermediate unit, but a winner for all that, clambered onto a chair to have a closer look. It wasn’t likely anybody’d be stupid enough to build a fire at the Haunted House in broad daylight, but, then, you never knew what those crazy Rinkydinks might get up to. Though the existence of the Rinkydink Club, a motley collection of the camp’s older boys, was kept hidden from Pa Starbuck, Ma was not fooled; she knew they held secret meetings down in the cellar of the house, where they smoked Lucky Strikes and talked about “doing it,” in defiance of camp rules, not to mention the ghost that roamed the premises and was reputed, from time to time, to have been “seen.” If Tiger gauged matters correctly, however, the smoke was coming not from the Haunted House but from Indian Woods, where a work detail of “fire-builders” was policing the Seneca campfire area for that evening’s initiation rites. Tonight, being the end of the first two-week camp period,. would see the first all-camper council fire and torchlight parade, when the newest members of the Seneca Lodge would be initiated. Yesterday, at a special meeting, seven inductees had been chosen for the honor.

Reassured, Ma returned to the papers she had been perusing before Tiger’s line drive interrupted her, while Tiger finished his task. Presently, he shook the dustpan into the tin wastebasket beside her chair, then asked for his money envelope.

“Coop’s not open, honey. You can’t have your money envelope less’n store’s open, you know that.’

“I want it so I can pay for the glass.”

“So’s he can pay for the glass,” Ma repeated to no one in particular. “Tiger Abernathy, there’s not another boy in camp would come in here of his own accord and offer to pay for a smashed windowpane. You aim to break that record as well?”

He waited while she riffled with plump fingers through the alphabetized money envelopes standing in the Thom

McAn shoebox she used for filing purposes. Her eyes, always troublesome, were bothered by the afternoon sun streaming through the back window, and she reached for her green celluloid eyeshade, the sort that gamblers and railway baggage-masters favor. Ma had her own homey style. With her broad, maternal bosom, made for comforting boys, her graying hair that hardly knew which way to grow, her round, puffy cheeks, untouched by the artifice of makeup, her firm little chin, and the slip straps that always showed through the tops of her dresses, she was every camper’s “Ma.”

Still waiting as she searched, Tiger added helpfully, “I’m the first one, Ma. Ab, remember?”

“Shucks, and don’t I know it. Abernathy, Brewster – here you are.”

Tiger winced at the name; nobody, except at his peril, ever called Tiger “Brewster,” not even the teachers in school. The last guy who tried had had the wind butted out of him by Tiger’s granite-hard head and been sent sprawling.

Ma flicked the envelope out of the box and handed it over. With tanned, grubby fingers, Tiger pinched the clasp, lifted the flap, blew, and peered inside.

“How much do you figure the damage’ll be, Ma?” he asked.

“Well, lessee, glass ought to be ’bout a quarter, don’t you think?”

“How about the putty and the glazier’s points?”

“Hell’s bells, what do I know about putty or them other doodads? You slap a quarter there on the desk and we’ll call it square.”

Her chair swiveled with a screech as she turned to face her desk again. The cubbyholes of the old rolltop were stuffed with an array of envelopes and papers, and more of the same littered the oaken surface, along with ledgers, open and shut,- and a cast-iron spindle piercing a sheaf of pink laundry slips. A blocked-out campers’ chart, showing the allocation of bunks in the cabins of the various units, stood out amid the jumble. Ma’s desk was, so to speak, the central switchboard and nerve center of Friend-Indeed; from it were disbursed all payments, all orders and announcements, practically all the comings and goings of the entire camp.

“Before you go, Tige, I need a word with you.”

Glancing past the pale, balding spot on the top of her head, Tiger saw she was staring intently at the chart.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

Ma shook her head. “There’s this new boy coming tomorrow, is all” – she rummaged through the papers on her desk – “the one replacing Stanley Wagner, you know.”

Tiger knew. This summer Howie Bochman, one of their regular cabin-mates, had been lost to the Jeremians as a result of having contracted a case of infantile paralysis, a blow that had been compounded by Howie’s replacement, the unfortunate Stanley Wagner. Unfortunate because Stanley’s presence in Cabin 7 had not worked out. He had been, in a word, a spud, and the entire camp still smarted from the embarrassing and shameful episode that had ended his brief stay at Friend-Indeed.

“Not good camper fodder,” had been the judgment of Reece Hartsig, Jeremiah’s counselor, and no one had disagreed. A bedwetter (at fourteen!), a crybaby, and incurably homesick, Stanley had proved the wimpiest camper anyone could recall ever having come to the lake. Demerits had rained like hailstones upon Cabin 7 for Stanley’s sundry errors and malfeasances, and the camel’s back had been broken when, after a visit by a select group of campers to the Castle, a crystal paperweight had been discovered missing, in consequence of which Ma’s friend, Dagmar Kronborg, had declared her home and its “trophy room” off limits for the remainder of the season.

The paperweight had eventually turned up hidden at the bottom of Stanley’s suitcase, and after an official meeting of the Sachems’ Council, the camp’s governing board, the culprit had been “sent to Scarsdale,” which meant nobody in camp was allowed to talk to him for three whole days; then, having survived this trial, the next day Stanley had simply gone up in smoke, his parents spiriting him away with neither farewells nor apologies, and leaving behind only the yellow-stained length of canvas in his bunk. Now that bunk would get a new canvas, and a new boy in it, and all the Jeremians were looking forward to his coming.

Ma found what she was looking for, an already opened letter. Tiger, who knew better than to read over a person’s shoulder, waited until she looked up; her face was suddenly dyed emerald as a sunbeam pierced her eyeshade.

“Name’s Leo,” she said. She adjusted her spectacles -“Leo – Joakum? I guess that’s how you’d say it.” “Where’s he from?” Tiger asked.

“Saggetts Notch.” She gave him a glance. “Fact is, he comes from Pitt.”

“The Institute?” Tiger was surprised. “An orphan?”

Ma nodded. “Dr Dunbar and the Joshua Society folks arranged it.”

Tiger mulled over this unexpected news; he didn’t know any orphans that he could recall. Ma held up the three pages of script and explained. The letter had been written by one Elsie Meekum, an assistant to Edwin Poe, supervisor of the Institute, and that gentleman’s liaison with Dr Dunbar, the president of the Friends of Joshua.

“It’s a sad case,” Ma said, her face expressing sympathy for the plight of this Leo Joakum. “We must be sure he has a good time. Try to see he fits in, so he doesn’t end up like-” Though she left her sentence unfinished, Tiger knew she was thinking of Stanley.