At the end of the 1960 spring term before the first scholarship boys, including me, were to show up in the fall, the rector of St. Philip’s, a tall, stiff Georgian with flamboyant white eyebrows and a British manner, called the entire student body and faculty together on the rolling lawn outside the towering Gothic church called the New Chapel. He warned the assembled 480 students that “a new type of boy” would be arriving at the school in the fall.

 

I only knew about the speech from eavesdropped gossip. Some sort of admonition seems to have been given against telling me the details. The only portion I was ever able to get anyone to recount in detail was the part about table manners. The rector warned that the new boys would be “quite unlike” other boys at the school, perhaps with strange ways of speaking and odd clothing. Our manners might be quite different, or we might not have any manners at all. None. At the table, for example, we might even eat with our hands. The rector was very firm in telling the boys that no one was to remark upon or call attention to our appearance or behavior.

 

The business about eating with our hands was a real concern. I learned that the senior student supervisors, who were stationed at long tables with the younger boys in the Lower School dining room, were told in a separate meeting that, if a scholarship boy were to begin eating with his hands, the supervisors were to eat with their hands, too. Needless to say, they awaited our arrival in a state of high consternation.

 

The irony in this for me was my mother’s special obsession with table manners. She had drilled me and my brother on knives, forks, spoons, soupspoons, fish knives and finger bowls from birth. Now that I was being sent to dine among the wealthy, her greatest fear was that I would embarrass the family in front of them, an anxiety greatly heightened when I came home from junior high school in Pontiac at the end of the 1960 school year with a bleeding knife wound over one eye.

 

A hillbilly kid named Kelvin had called me a pussy. If there had been no witnesses, I might have weaseled out of it with a devastating wisecrack and a twenty-yard dash, but he called me a pussy in front of the entire wood shop. I was skinny and not at all a good fighter. I could throw a basic punch and block a slow one, but only because a boy in Pontiac, Michigan, who couldn’t throw or block a punch at all would be dead by the fourth grade.

 

Unfortunately for me that day, the word, pussy, was the one thing from which one could never retreat. I have no idea why. But if someone called you a pussy in Pontiac, there was no way out. You fought, or you died.

 

I don’t even remember why Kelvin called me a pussy. We were in the center of the vast, barracks-like woodshop, surrounded by lathes, drill presses, and workbenches, where we were training for our destiny as factory workers. Kelvin, who had recently arrived from Kentucky, was long and lean with a hawk nose and flashing dark eyes. People were afraid of him. He was snake-mean and carried a gaudy imitation pearl handle switchblade knife that he liked to take out to show how quick he was.

 

He and I were surrounded by a dense ring of boys in blue denim smocks and dust-smeared safety goggles pushed up on their sweaty foreheads. We all carried in our hands heavy wood-handled chisels with long steel blades. When he called me a pussy, I had my chisel in my left hand, my off hand, but I hit him with it anyway, landing a weak glancing blow on the right side of his head. He produced the switchblade as if it were part of his hand, and time popped like a soap bubble. We stood facing each other in a dimension of silence and fate. The blade came glinting to my jugular like a trail of stars rushing down from the sky. I ducked to my right. The knife went high just above my left ear. His head and hand were extended forward over his balance point. As I pulled my head back up left, Kelvin made a sloppy after-plunge to his left and caught me a deep gash above my right eye. But in that silence out of time I threw the chisel to my right hand. Gripping it hard with both hands and before he could get up square again, I cut the air and landed a shivering crunch with the chisel’s long steel blade against his left temple. He stood up stiff, stopped moving, dropped both arms to his sides and stared at me with wide, unseeing eyes. The knife clattered to the floor. His knees folded like a church chair, and he collapsed backward in a hump, eyes clamped shut like a baby. A disembodied voice behind me whispered, “Woodrow done kilt that hillbilly son of a bitch.”

 

And suddenly, time and sound returned, boys hooting and hollering, jumping up and down, the woodshop instructor, Mr. Betka, rushing forward in his gray pinstripe coveralls, throwing boys out of the way like laundry. He wrenched a red fire extinguisher from a post, aimed it at Kelvin’s head, pulled the trigger and covered his slumbering face with white foam.

 

Kelvin’s eyes opened and his head snapped up. He sat akimbo on the floor, wiping foam from his face and spitting it from his mouth. He spotted the knife next to him on the floor, snatched it up and leapt to his feet in a shower of white flecks, ready to go again but this time against Mr. Betka, who was standing in front of him with the extinguisher. Kelvin started to lift the knife, but Mr. Betka shot foam into his eyes. Kelvin stopped, wiped his eyes clear with his left hand and came at Mr. Betka again. Mr. Betka shot foam into his eyes and mouth again. Every time Kelvin tried to wipe his face and mouth, Mr. Betka shot him full of foam again.

 

 Mr. Betka danced around him, shooting him with foam, making him turn and turn, until finally Kelvin began to miss steps and stagger. Boys laughed uproariously. Mr. Betka took the fire extinguisher with both hands and swung it hard like a homerun baseball bat against Kelvin’s knife hand. The knife went to the floor. Mr. Betka snatched it up, closed it deftly with one hand and dropped it into the breast pocket of his coveralls. Kelvin held up his wrecked hand like the foot of a mangled bird.

 

He cried, “You done broke all my fingers you goddamn Yankee son of a bitch.”

 

Mr. Betka said to a boy standing nearby, “Go to the office and tell them to call the cops.”

 

Kelvin grasped the injured right hand at the wrist, looked around the room sharply like a cornered wolf, then lowered his head and snarled roughly through the crowd. He ran out a back door to an open storage yard. We could barely see him in the distance, climbing a low steel fence with his left hand, the mangled claw dangling painfully to his right. He dropped to the far side of the fence, gave us all a left-handed middle finger, turned, and ran. We never saw him again.

 

Mr. Betka called me to him with a gesture. He pushed my wound open with a hard thumb.

 

“You see out of both them eyes, Woodrow?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

He plucked a dirty orange machine rag off my lathe and snapped off the sawdust.

 

“Shove this up in that cut, hold it there, stop that blood coming down your neck.”

 

He turned to the gawping boys, who looked back and forth from him to me and to the empty fence in the distance.

 

“I told you men oncet, I told you a hundert times, don’t never hit a man with a tool. This time, that dumb hillbilly took after young Woodrow here with a knife, so I guess that about evens it out. More’s amazing, it looks like Woodrow done won it for oncet.”

 

After a moment, my name went up in a sudden cheer: “Wood! Row!” It was the best day of my life to that point. It may still be.

 

Mr. Betka sent me to the school nurse, who called my mother and said I would need stitches. My father was home from work and came to get me. He consulted with the nurse and Mr. Betka, then drove wordless all the way home. I knew not to break his silence. When I walked into the house, my mother cried out, not in pity but shame.

 

“You had to go and get your face cut up, didn’t you? Just in time so you can go off to that rich people’s school and make us all look like white trash.”

 

She wanted my father to take me into Pontiac to the hospital to have it sewn up properly, but he said I’d have to go to the country sawbones up the road who tended to the farm families and factory workers of Little Ottawa.

 

My mother said, “He’ll stitch him up like a goddamn barn cat.”

 

My father said, “It’s what we can afford, and it’s what he deserves.”

 

On the way to the sawbones, he said to me, “Betka told me you knocked that hillbilly down with a hammer.”

 

“No, sir. Chisel.”

 

“Jesus, Woodrow, you are one problem.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Never again take a weapon to a man’s head. I mean never. You hear me, boy? A fight is a fight. A weapon is prison.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“So you won it then?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

He turned toward me twice without speaking. Finally, he said, “Woodrow, you are one problem. I am going to miss hell out of you up there in that school.”

 

“Yes, sir. I will miss you and Ma and David.”

 

“It’s the chancet of a lifetime, Woodrow. It’s such a big chancet, I cain’t hardly believe it come to us. Don’t go and mess it up.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

He reached over and tousled my hair as he had not done since I was little. I thought I saw the glint of a tear.

 

“But boy, you promise your old daddy from Quitman County, Georgia, one goddamn thing, you hear?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Don’t take no shit off nobody.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

“Jesus Christ, Woodrow, you are one problem. Just don’t get kicked out.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

“But I mean it, don’t take no shit either.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

* * *

 

 

 

For the rest of the spring and summer, my mother never looked at my face without turning a sharp eye to the scar above my right eye. I know she hoped with each passing day she would see it fade, and it did a little, but never enough. A week before I was to take the sixteen-hour Greyhound bus ride by myself to Boston, she even briefly proposed makeup, an idea my father quickly killed. She punished me by subjecting me to a merciless Saturday-long refresher course on rich people’s table manners, along with relentless corrections of grammar, diction, and usage.

 

 On one important point, she remained adamant.

 

“Don’t be envious, Woodrow. An envious man is lower than a drunk.” She said it over and over again, in case the admonition slipped my mind.