gat

The spirit that came over Mother when she shattered the glass must have revived in me to set the
stage for that whipping. One night after bed check, I set out to get home to my river. I felt sure
my grandparents wouldn’t turn me away. I planned the break for weeks, and took no one into my
confidence. I had a dozen bags of salted peanuts from the commissary, a thin wool blanket and a
pillow, and the leather football Uncle Bud gave me when he went away to war.
Most of the first night I walked, hiding in the tall grass away from the road all the next day, eating
peanuts. I had gotten away full of determination. I would make it home, I knew, if I could only
figure out what direction Monongahela was in! But by midafternoon the following day, I made a
fatal mistake. Tired of walking and hiding, I decided to hitch a ride as I had once seen Clark Gable
do in a famous movie with Claudette Colbert. I was picked up by two matronly ladies whom I
regaled deceitfully with a story of my falling out of the back of Granddad’s pickup truck where
dog Nappy and I had been riding on the way back to Mon City. "He didn’t notice I was gone and
he probably thinks I jumped out when we got home and went to play."
I had not calculated the fatal football that would give me away. As a precaution against theft (so
they said) the Ursulines stamped "St. Xavier" many times on every possession. My football hadn’t
escaped the accusatory stencil. As we chatted like old comrades about how wonderful it was to be
going to Monongahela, a town out of legend we all agreed, the nice ladies took me directly to the
Latrobe police, who took me directly—heedless of my hot tears and promises to even let them
have my football—back to the ladies in black.
The whole school assembled to witness my disgrace. Boys and girls arranged in a long gauntlet
through which I was forced on hands and knees to crawl the length of the administration building
to where Mother Superior stood exhorting the throng to avoid my sorry example. When I arrived
in front of her, she slapped my face. I suppose my sister must have been there watching, too.
Sister and I never discussed Xavier, not once, then or afterwards.
The intellectual program at Xavier, influenced heavily by a Jesuit college nearby, constituted a
massive refutation of the watery brain diet of government schooling. I learned so much in a single
year I was nearly in high school before I had to think very hard about any particular idea or
procedure presented in public school. I learned how to separate pertinent stuff from dross; I
learned what the difference between primary and secondary data was, and the significance of each;
I learned how to evaluate separate witnesses to an event; I learned how to reach conclusions a
half-dozen ways and the potential for distortion inherent in the dynamics of each method of
reasoning. I don’t mean to imply at all that I became a professional thinker. I remained very much
a seven- and eight-year-old boy. But I moved far enough in that year to become comfortable with
matters of mind and intellect.
Unlike the harsh treatment of our bodies at Xavier, even the worst boy there was assumed to have
dignity, free will, and a power to choose right over wrong. Materialistic schooling, which is all
public schooling even at its best can ever hope to be, operates as if personality changes are
ultimately caused externally, by applications of theory and by a skillful balancing of rewards and
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