The Feast of Thanksgiving

In Honor of Thanksgiving, I present an abridged Chapter 8, The Feast of Thanksgiving, from my book, Elm Street (2016). The main character, Frank Wilcox, has settled into second grade at the Acorn Primary School in Acorn. The night I wrote this story, I laughed so hard that I cried. I hope you enjoy it and Happy Thanksgiving! SDV

The Feast of Thanksgiving
(From Scott Vaughan's Elm Street)        

The photo appearing in the newspaper
I am pictured far right with the Clorox jug

Mrs. Wright’s classroom had survived Halloween, complete with syrup-filled wax candy in the shape of cola bottles, cupcakes with orange icing, and drinks from the Coca-Cola machines. Those children who didn’t have a dime for a drink were treated to one by moms helping with the day’s party. Children were allowed to dress in their favorite costumes and then stand in front of the class to introduce themselves.

            Frank had come to school as a wolf man, a reoccurring Halloween character for him. Last year’s wolf man costume still fit around the waist, even if the pants were short, and the shorter pants actually lent to the authenticity of the costume. Lon Chaney Jr., who played the Wolf Man onscreen, would have been proud.

            When it came time for him to stand in front of the class, he pulled down the plastic wolfm an mask with its tight string of elastic around his head. He peered at his classmates through the two eye holes of the mask and did what he thought any self-respecting wolf man might do—he turned his head toward the ceiling and howled. Loudly.

           

            With Halloween in the rearview, Mrs. Wright now focused on Thanksgiving. There would be no Thanksgiving party, but she wanted to draw attention to the holiday—to help the students deeply appreciate the holiday beyond just a day off from school and turkey at Grandma’s house. She found a book titled The Feast of Thanksgiving, and the children took turns reading it aloud to the class.

            That was when Mrs. Wright had a glorious idea: the class would produce a Thanksgiving play based on the book The Feast of Thanksgiving. And because the class was studying early American settlers going west, the Thanksgiving play would have an interesting twist. Instead of English pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe breaking bread together in seventeenth-century New England, her play would be about a wagon of settlers going west and coming upon the Cherokee. The Cherokee would befriend the settlers—despite the settlers having driven the tribe off their homes to vast Oklahoma nothingness—and provide the settlers with food and water at the brink of disaster. These were very forgiving Indians.

            She was beyond excited. She had roles for the play. There were the settlers—two couples with no children on kind of a double date across miles of prairie. They traveled in a wagon that was four school desks put together, two by two, with large paper wheels attached to the outside of the desks. It resembled a 1960s Ford station wagon.

Mrs. Edith Wright
Not just a favorite teacher, but one I loved

            Mrs. Wright had a handful of characters. There was a proud Indian chief, proud because his wife was one of the prettiest girls in the universe, not just the second grade. This couple had two children who sat all the time in front of the camp tipi. There was the chief’s brother, whose mama had gotten carried away with makeup, presenting him as a hop, skip, and a jump from the warpath. There were four tribal maidens who, as it turned out, had no real part in the play except to stand behind the chief. They were like backup singers.

            And there was a dog.

            Selecting children for the parts in the play was not a democratic process. The children did not vote. Mrs. Wright selected the children she wanted to be in the play, and those children agreed to give up a handful of afternoon recesses to practice the play. There were some bitter feelings among some students, but Mrs. Wright consoled them with the possibility of an Easter play—which never happened. Mrs. Wright depended on the short memory of second graders.

            At the first rehearsal, Mrs. Wright attempted to give out parts for the play. Everyone wanted to be an Indian, but Mrs. Wright said it could not be that way, and she chose four of the children to be the settlers. There was some general pouting among those chosen to be settlers, but Mrs. Wright reminded them how important they were to the Thanksgiving story, and moods were lightened. Without starving settlers, there was no one for the forgiving Indians to save.

            Frank was standing off to the side with his friend Carla when Mrs. Wright selected Carla to be an Indian maiden and sit in front of the tipi. Mrs. Wright looked around the room, shrugged, looked at Frank, and said, “Frank, I need you to be the dog.”

            The dog?

           Frank had been down this road before. Two years back, at the First Baptist Kindergarten, all
the boys in the class had gathered to play out a scene from their favorite television show, Daniel Boone. Charlie Keller seized the opportunity to be the famous wilderness explorer by wearing a

fringed leather coat to school. All the other boys in the classroom had shouted out parts they wanted to play—some even agreeing to be British redcoats, just to have a meaningful part to play. Frank, who was not as assertive as the other boys, watched as roles were claimed. When it was all said and done, Charlie came to his rescue. Not wanting to desert his best friend, Charlie said to Frank, “You can be my dog. You know Daniel Boone had a dog.”

            For several mornings during kindergarten, while his friends clumsily acted out scenes from Daniel Boone, Frank crawled around on the floor alongside his friend Charlie, doing his best impersonation of man’s best friend. He even tried to bite one British soldier on the ankle, which got him kicked in the side by a boy named Ricky.

            Frank was disappointed that Mrs. Wright had chosen him to play the role of the Indians’ dog, and although he didn’t understand typecasting, it was becoming painfully clear that he was playing a lot of canine parts.

            “That’s what happens when you dress up like wolf man every year at Halloween and howl like a damn dog,” Tom said, trying to push his sons to dress in easy costumes like those of a farmer.

            

            So the next day, Frank went to school and waited for the rehearsal during afternoon recess. As Mrs. Wright assembled the students, Frank said, “I don’t want to be the dog.” At that, another child spoke up and said, “I don’t want to be a settler.” And another child spoke up and said, “I want to go outside for recess.”

            Mutiny broke out on the set of The Feast of Thanksgiving.

            Mrs. Wright, in her perfectly calm and soothing way, eased the troubled spirit of her company. She allowed the boy who didn’t want to be a settler to be an Indian, and one of the Indians volunteered to be one of the settlers. And then she told Frank that he could just be an Indian, too…

            …he could be the water bearer.

            As the water bearer, she explained, Frank would carry around a large empty Clorox jug with the label taken off of it. When the chief said, “I need some water,” Frank would run over to a make-believe stream and get the chief some water. Frank had gone from being the Indians’ dog to being the team’s water boy. To fill the void of the missing dog, Indian maiden Carla brought a white stuffed dog, which Frank thought looked more like a pony.

            

            Other children in the class were chosen to help build a tipi for the Indian camp, which Frank thought was pretty authentic looking. Others helped build the settlers’ wagon. Someone brought a Giddy-Up Stick—a horse’s head attached to the end of a pole for make-believe horse riding—and the stick was stuck on the front of the wagon. That was one beat-to-hell horse, having to pull that frontier station wagon with four settlers riding in it—especially with no legs.

            The week before Thanksgiving break, the children performed The Feast of Thanksgiving for the other students in Mrs. Wright’s class. It was a simple production.

            The play opened with the Indians working around their tipi, some building a fire and some preparing food. Carla sat in front of the tipi, holding her stuffed dog while Travis Jackson sat beside her. Travis had suggested bringing his dog, Fred, into class to be in the play, but Mrs. Wright asked him to bring a stuffed toy dog. What he brought was most certainly a stuffed horse, and the play’s animal cast grew by one.

            The settlers parked their wagon a safe distance from the camp and then proceeded to walk into camp. They were met by the chief and his beautiful wife. The Indian who had on the war paint relished his role and stood behind the chief, arms folded, staring menacingly ahead. Clearly, he had not forgiven the move to Oklahoma. Frank didn’t wait on the chief to ask for water; he went and got some and offered it up.

            After some general small talk, the settlers admitted they were starving from the time on the trail. They were also tired. The chief offered them food and rest and sent Frank on three trips to the nearby stream to fetch water for everyone.

            The satisfied and comfortable settlers thanked and thanked the Indians for saving their lives and remarked that—lo and behold—it was Thanksgiving! The Indians had a general idea of what that meant—to the settlers anyway—and a celebration ensued. There was awkward dancing that resembled something like a cross between square dancing and the twist. The play ended with everyone happy and everyone thankful. The sour Indian participated in the celebration but didn’t seem to enjoy it.

            The class clapped, the cast bowed, and everyone was happy. Mrs. Wright beamed. Mrs. Wright was so proud of the play that over the next week, she invited every first-grade class and every second-grade class to come into her classroom and see it. Her poor students who were not in the play had the privilege of seeing it nine times—including a special performance one morning for the parents of those in the cast.

            All the children who saw the play seemed to enjoy it. Mrs. Roper, understandably, had the best-behaved class of them all. She carried her paddle.

            For the last performance, Mrs. Wright took one step perhaps too far. She invited the local newspaper, the Acorn County News, to come to the school and take a photograph of the cast at the conclusion of the play. The ensuing photograph ran the next week in the newspaper with this caption: “Members of Mrs. Edith Wright’s second-grade class dramatized a story, The Feast of Thanksgiving, which had been read in class. All the first- and second-year pupils were invited to see the dramatization. All the children enjoyed seeing the headdresses, beads, long dresses, and Indian dances, which were quite authentic. The play was colorful and informative, and the students enjoyed it.”

            There was no mention of the settlers.

            And rightly so. Because after the final performance, and before the photograph, anarchy erupted among the cast. The four settlers didn’t really want to be settlers; they were just, well, settling by being settlers. The settlers really wanted to be Indians. By the time the newspaper photographer snapped his photograph, all the settlers had donned Indian headdresses, and now the settlers sat in their wagon dressed as Indians. Never had a Thanksgiving feast had this kind of impact on its participants. The newspaper photograph showed nothing but a cast of Indians; the poor settlers were nowhere to be found and had lost their wagon. Revenge of the Cherokee.

            Mrs. Wright didn’t care. She cut the photograph from the newspaper and pinned it to a bulletin board. And, more than once, Frank and the other students saw her pause at the bulletin board, stare at the photograph, and smile.

*****
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