Fires in the Wilderness by Jeffery L Schatzer

Author:Jeffery L Schatzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781587267048
Publisher: Spry Publishing LLC

Chapter 18

Hard Rain

It had been raining around the clock since I had gotten my chain-of-command lecture from Mike O’Shea. Stosh had been gone three long days. Sunup tomorrow would be day four. Captain Mason told me he might allow him back if he returned in a couple days. By most accounts, a couple means two. Stosh was stretching his luck. What’s more, all of us were exhausted from picking up his slack.

After lights out, I laid in my cot thinking. Though I was dog tired and arm weary, I couldn’t sleep. The rain was coming in waves. A leak at the top of the center pole kept up a rhythmic drip of raindrops on the floor. Thoughts kept running through my mind.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I thought about Mike and our last run-in. Mike O’Shea was bigger, older, and stronger than me. The way I figured it, he’d been a bully most of his life. I had been warned about people like him. My father told me that the only way to stop bullies was to stand up to them. I wasn’t afraid to fight Mike if it came to that.

My father was a great boxer in his time. Once he even fought Stanley Ketchell, the Polish boxer from Grand Rapids who won the world middleweight championship in 1908. Father gave up his dream to be a professional boxer after that fight. He got married and settled down, taking a job in a furniture factory until he was laid off in 1931.

From the time we were little, our father taught both Squint and me how to box. He built a boxing ring with cotton rope in the backyard and showed us how to defend ourselves. We learned how to punch and duck, to use our legs as well as our arms to deliver a punch. Squint never really took to the sport. Maybe it was because his eyesight was so bad. On the other hand, I got pretty good at it. Though I was never really interested in brawling in the alleys with other boys, I enjoyed boxing. In local tournaments I went undefeated for two straight years.

Though the prospect of fighting with Mike didn’t bother me much, I was worried about the outcome—one way or the other. If I lost, Big Mike would rub my nose in the fact he had beaten me. If I won, Big Mike would continue to bait me into a re-match or use his position in the CCC to beat me down.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

I was worried that if I fought with Mike, I might get kicked out of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Part of the Oath of Enrollment talked about obeying rules and following the orders of superiors. Clearly Big Mike was a superior, and the captain and lieutenant established the rule that they didn’t want any fighting.

The CCC was more than a job. It was life, life for my whole family. My sister had written several times since I arrived at Camp Polack Lake. Squint

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