"I'm not going to wear them!"
"Oh yes you are!"
"I'm not going to school if you make me wear them!"
"Oh yes you are!"
"They're the ugliest things I've ever seen. Nobody wears those any more!"
"Yes they do. We do!"
"I hate those rubbers. I'm not wearing them and I mean it. I really mean it."
And with that I seized the thick brown molded rubbers my mother was holding out and pulled them with trembling fingers and shaking hands over my brown lace shoes, storming out our barn door and down the gravel driveway to begin a half-mile walk to school on a misty New England morning.
I tramped through barely perceptible puddles along the edge of the road and turned the corner by the Reed's house, the big house that was next door to ours. I kept muttering to myself: "Evidently she doesn't know I'm a sixth-grader yet, or else that just doesn't make any difference to her." Suddenly a strange and mutinous idea broke into my head like an enemy soldier bursting into a house.
I looked carefully to see if Mrs. Reed was watching out her window. When I didn't see her, I took the rubbers off swiftly, ran up to a large bush that crowded against the white clapboards on the side of her house, slipped the rubbers deftly underneath it and kept on walking, as though I had only stopped to look at a caterpillar.
In a town that can still measure its population with three digits, you have to be careful of every little thing you do. Insurrectionists find it's hardly worth the bother, not because of any moral inhibition, but just because every crime is discovered practically the moment it happens and reported to the home authorities, i.e. parents, almost before the criminal can get home himself. I had seen many examples of this in my town.
One time my older brother Ted was wandering through the center of town with a couple of his alleged friends. They stopped behind someone's house to study the architecture of an abandoned chicken house. They noticed that many of the small windows were already broken, but that there were still a fair number of unbroken windows. The shed had not been occupied for years, so they didn't see any real need for those unbroken windows, and they subdued them quickly with stones.
My brother Ted could run fast. But not quite as fast as Rumor can make it across a small town. By the time Ted got home, Rumor had already been there, and my mother knew that a very angry chicken-house owner was on his way to talk to her. What was amazing about all this was not the severity of the crime or the punishment (hard labor for Ted and his friends for three afternoons), but the swiftness with which the crime was reported and tried and a sentence handed down. Justice was done almost before the stones began their downward slide into the panes of glass.
It's hard to understand what made me think I could turn to a life of crime under these circumstances. I was edgy all the way to school. I had never managed to keep my feet so dry as I did that morning. I was fidgety behind my desk all day. My penmanship lesson went terribly. After school, I practically ran home. When I got to the Reed's house, I searched again for witnesses. I didn't see any. I rushed up to the bush.
My close-cropped hair stood almost on end when I looked and couldn't find the brown rubbers anywhere. After casually leaning round and examining every bush for strange creatures of any sort, I finally gave up and dragged myself defeated home. As I entered through the barn and into the mud room I saw the brown rubbers neatly lined up in their usual place. I went inside and found my mother having tea with a visitor I'd seen many times, whose name started with a big R. By the time my mother had said hello and politely asked me about my day at school, I had already reevaluated my future.
from SMALL TOWN TALES, copyright 1997, by Sidney Hall, Jr.