Free When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood

out in Father’s Bob’s take-along dictionary. She dawdles so long over sorting her letters that her baby brother groans in fake, theatrical anguish.
Maaargaret!
    Keep your shirt on. I’ve got something.
She’s angling for a seven-letter word but so far that’s happened only once.
    If you had something, you’d have played it
—he checks his handsome watch—
twenty minutes ago.
    Her cheeks pinken, she gives him a catlike leer, then lays down tile after tile. I imagine that S-I-N-G-I-N-G is the magic word, the
g
shared with Father Bob’s triple-word-scored
ghost.
    La la la,
Mum says.
Don’t get too big for your britches, buster.
    But that’s not what will happen today when he goes to her. The Scrabble game will sit on the table, unopened. She’ll pour him some coffee. He’ll cry and cry. Mum will watch for us out the window, coming down the street in our green uniforms. “The girls are here, Father,” she’ll say when she spots us. And he’ll pull himself together.
    Â 
    As soon as Father Bob leaves our classroom in a gust of glory, Sister Ernestine says, “Let’s stick with Geography.” She’s feeling good, flushed with secondhand celebrity, so instead of moving on to French, Geography it is. Her favorite. She’s mad about explorer stories, all those brazen men from Spain and Portugal in storm-shocked fleets they named for saints, their intrepid forays to convert the heathen masses while dumping their ballast of rocks and replacing it with gold, tea, saffron, curry. But the Europeans aren’t the only characters in her collection; still agog from Father’s visit, she unveils one of her favorites, a real corker about the Oxford’s founder, a story that unfolded “right here in our own backyard” about eighty years before she assigned us our permanent, scarified desks in her fourth-grade classroom. Every schoolchild in Mexico learns this story, which goes like this:
    On a snow-blown December day in 1882, a young, well-fed Portland businessman—Mr. Chisholm was his name—arrived by train at the Rumford Point Hotel, borrowed a sleigh from the proprietor, and started down the road along the river. What could he be up to? As he made his purposeful way, the snow magically lifted and the day turned clear and crisp and still. The man enjoyed this quality of quiet, for he was an industrialist whose daily life teemed with enterprise. The cold sun poured over this blessed quiet, until a remarkable thundering left the man no doubt of his location. Out of the sleigh he climbed, his eyebrows grizzled with hoarfrost. He shivered inside his heavy coat, ran a glove along the country-bred nose of his borrowed horse, slipped the beast a sugar cube for its trouble.
    â€œWhat was the horse’s name?”
    A beat. “St. Jude.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œWell, the Chisholms were Catholic.” (Like all of Sister’s explorers, whether or not the evidence supported the claim.)
    â€œBut he borrowed the horse.”
    â€œThen I assume the hotel man was also Catholic.”
    In the bracing cold, the stranger’s breath formed cloudlets of wonder as he took in the river’s first plummet, a nearly perpendicular drop of seventy-five feet that split a wild expanse of land ringed by snow-muffled hills. His gaze traveled downriver, where the Androscoggin continued its plunge, one hundred eighty feet over a half-mile stretch, the rocks and boulders smoothed over time by the river’s inestimable weight. Here was Hugh J. Chisholm, our town’s industrial founder, standing on high like God at the beginning of the world, the sound of falling water and a new idea drumming in his head.
    The horse rattled its furry ears. The winter light rinsed the scene with a nearly painful clarity. The wilderness rolled away, and away, until Hugh believed he could see all the way to Canada.
    He’d grown up near Niagara and