Well, what do you know, I thought to myself with a smile. There’s serenity in my step!
And it must have showed. Because when I emerged from the alley and said howdy to the two old men passing by, they both said howdy back. And though on the way into town, ten cars had passed me before the mechanic picked me up, on the way back to the Watsons’， the first car that came along pulled over to offer me a ride.
Woolly
The funny thing about a story, thought Woolly—while Emmett was in town, and Duchess was on a walk, and Billy was reading aloud from his big red book—the funny thing about a story is that it can be told in all sorts of lengths.
The first time Woolly heard The Count of Monte Cristo, he must have been younger than Billy. His family was spending the summer at the camp in the Adirondacks, and every night his sister Sarah would read him a chapter before he went to bed. But what his sister was reading from was the original book by Alexander Dumas, which was a thousand pages long.
The thing about hearing a story like The Count of Monte Cristo from the one-thousand-page version is that whenever you sense an exciting part is coming, you have to wait and wait and wait for it to actually arrive. In fact, sometimes you have to wait so long for it to arrive you forget that it’s coming altogether and let yourself drift off to sleep. But in Billy’s big red book, Professor Abernathe had chosen to tell the entire story over the course of eight pages. So in his version, when you sensed an exciting part was coming, it arrived lickety-split.
Like the part that Billy was reading now—the part when Edmond Dantès, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, is carted off to spend the rest of his life in the dreaded Chateau d’If. Even as he is being led in chains through the prison’s formidable gates, you just know that Dantès is bound to escape. But in Mr. Dumas’s telling, before he regains his freedom you have to listen to so many sentences spread across so many chapters that it begins to feel like you are the one who is in the Chateau d’If! Not so with Professor Abernathe. In his telling, the hero’s arrival at the prison, his eight years of solitude, his friendship with the Abbé Faria, and his miraculous escape all occur on the very same page.
Woolly pointed at the solitary cloud that was passing overhead.
—That’s what I imagine the Chateau d’If looked like.
Carefully marking his place with his finger, Billy looked up to where Woolly was pointing and readily agreed.
—With its straight rock walls.
—And the watchtower in the middle.
Woolly and Billy both smiled to see it, but then Billy’s expression grew rather more serious.
—Can I ask you a question, Woolly?
—Of course, of course.
—Was it hard to be at Salina?
As Woolly considered the question, far overhead the Chateau d’If transformed itself into an ocean liner—with a giant smokestack where the watchtower once had been.
—No, said Woolly, it wasn’t so hard, Billy. Certainly not like the Chateau d’If was for Edmond Dantès. It’s just that . . . It’s just that every day at Salina was an every-day day.
—What’s an every-day day, Woolly?
Woolly took another moment to consider.
—When we were at Salina, every day we would get up at the same time and get dressed in the same clothes. Every day we had breakfast at the same table with the same people. And every day we did the same work in the same fields before going to sleep at the same hour in the same beds.
Though Billy was just a boy, or maybe because he was just a boy, he seemed to understand that while there is nothing wrong with waking up or getting dressed or having breakfast, per se, there is something fundamentally disconcerting about doing these things in the exact same fashion day in and day out, especially in the one-thousand-page version of one’s own life.
After nodding, Billy found his place and began to read again.
What Woolly did not have the heart to tell Billy was that while this was unquestionably the way of life at Salina, it was also the way of life in many other places. It was certainly the way of life at boarding school. And not simply at St. George’s, where Woolly had most recently been enrolled. At all three boarding schools that Woolly had attended, every day they would wake up at the same time, get dressed in the same clothes, and have breakfast at the same table with the same people before heading off to attend the same classes in the same classrooms.
Woolly had often wondered about that. Why did the heads of boarding schools choose to make every day an every-day day? After some reflection, he came to suspect that they did so because it made things easier to manage. By turning every day into an every-day day, the cook would always know when to cook breakfast, the history teacher when to teach history, and the hall monitor when to monitor the halls.