--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Henry, Thomas R. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 32 number: 11 published: 1929-09 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "Thomas R. Henry, “A Wooden Cross Bares Soul of Most Incorrigible Boy,” *Improvement Era* 32, no. 11 (September 1929): 901–904." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera32011unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera32011unse start_page: 901 end_page: 904 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1929-09) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera32011unse publication_year: 1929 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1929, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # A Wooden Cross Bares Soul of Most Incorrigible Boy E Wooden Cross Bares Soul of Most Incorrigible Boy (Taken from the Washington Star) By Thomas R. Henry NOTE — This is the second of a series of articles telling of the remarkable experiment in the redemption of boys who have proved unmanageable in ordinary schools, which is being carried on by the District of Columbia public school system. [Harold D. Fife, mentioned in this article, is a young "Mormon" boy who is making a real contribution to the teaching profession. — The Editors.] 'EN though it be a cross." Peter was one of the worst problem children the District schools have known in recent years. Harold D. Fife, principal of the Gales Special School, has a stack of letters in his desk about the child. Some express unmitigated disgust; others sympathy, but hopelessness. Peter had been tried with all sorts of teachers. The strict disciplinarian found him un- manageable and dangerous. The gentle, motherly kind wasted their tenderness. The mental research department classified him as a dullard. Peter was ragged, dirty and a thief. His adolescent mind was a sewer of filthy thoughts. Girls weren't safe in the same room with him. When he was asked a question he would reply with a string of oaths and nastiness that would have shocked a mule driver. He took no interest in anything offered by the schools. He was an habitual truant. Here, it seemed, there was a congenital delinquent, if such a creature ever existed. As a last resort, Peter was transferred to the Gales Special School. He was a stubborn case. Week after week Fife tried to find some point of contact with whatever spark of goodness there might be in the child. His personality was impenetrable. Even among the problem cases he was outstandingly bad. Nothing could be found which interested him upon which to condition other interests. Here at last, Fife thought, was the exceptional case where his theories didn't work. Tried to Make Friends DAY after day the teacher talked with the boy on his own level and tried to make friends with him. The net result apparently was only a slight lessening of the animosity which the child felt for all teachers and all authority. That point of contact in the child's personality with decency 904 IMPROVEMENT ERA Sept., 1929 and aspiration which Fife thinks exists somewhere in every one could not be located and there seemed no alternative but to abandon him to a reform school — and probably to a succession of prisons after that — for the protection of society. Suddenly, strangely, beautifully, came the break. Peter had been showing the world an artificial, self-created shell of personality. Behind this he had hid his real self — a highly spirit- ual, luminous, saintly self, with Christ-like elements about it. He came to Fife's desk after school one afternoon. Query About Cross YER know dem crosses dey sticks on de stiffs out in Arlington?" he asked. "Yes." "Well, what I wants to know is how much the things costs." "I don't know — about $50, I should think." Fife noticed the boy's face fall. "As much as that?" "Yes. You see, they have to carve them out of a pretty big piece of stone and there is a lot of heavy work." "Don't they ever make 'em of nothing but stone that don't cost so much?" "Yes. You might make one out of wood." "Could I make one?" "I should think you could. I'd help you some. Why are you interested in crosses, Peter?" The old look of hostility came over Peter's face at this question. The teacher saw that he had made a mistake, that it was too soon to ask. ' "I want to make a cross," the boy said. Fife took him to a room downstairs where there was some lumber and a few tools. He showed him rapidly how the tools were used. Made Many Mistakes GO AHEAD and make your cross," he said. From that time on he didn't bother Peter with school work. Every morning the boy went to the lumber room, shut himself in and worked. He made many mistakes. There was much to be done over. But he seemed absorbed in his work. Never before had Peter shown any mechanical interests. For the first time something had been found which kept him out of mischief. Fife visited him every day and coached him a little. Sept., 1929 WOODEN CROSS BARES SOUL 905 Peter rather resented this coaching, but he listened and profited by it. He grew more and more friendly with the teacher. Finally Fife judged that the time was ripe to try once more to go a little deeper. "Peter, you've never told me why you are interested in crosses," he said. "Oh, didn't I? Well, you see, it's like this — " A marvelous transformation had come over the dirty, foul- mouthed boy in that moment. His mother had died 10 years before, leaving his father, a poor day laborer, with a large family. Outline of Stones HpHE family was poor. The mother had been buried in a corner -U- of one of the Washington cemeteries. They had put no head- stone over her grave. Brush and weeds had grown over it. The poor woman was cast utterly out of the world's memory. But there was an outline of stones around the space into which her coffin had been lowered. Peter had put them there/ Twice a year little Peter had trudged to the cemetery and filled in the gaps in that outline of stones. He had been doing this, un- known to anyone else, all the time that his school teachers had been calling him the worst boy in Washington. He had been doing this all the time that his tongue was so filthy that the most hardened teachers, men and women, couldn't endure listening to him. There he would kneel in the long grass, replacing the scattered stones. All around him, over the graves of the mothers of other little boys, rose monuments and crosses. Each of these pilgrimages only made' him worse. He would get even — the boy would clinch his fists and curse the Lord in Heaven — he would get even with a world which had treated his mother like this. Over her nameless grave he had promised to get even. He was keeping his word. The father was a well meaning man, but his thoughts were with the living and not the dead. His slender wage barely sufficed to feed the hungry mouths dependent on him. He tried to clothe them decently and made a terrible job of it, to judge by Peter. Not Hungry or Cold EVERY time the boy had suggested that a headstone be placed over his mother the father had dismissed the idea rather curtly. She was dead, wasn't she? She wasn't hungry or cold any more. She was comfortable enough there in the ground. Why bother with her when the kids needed clothes? 906 IMPROVEMENT ERA Sept.. 1929 He was not an unkind man, but he had no motherliness about him. He was too tired to mother the kids when he came back from his day's work. The human touch had gone out of Peter's life the day his mother's body, in a bare wooden box, had been carried out of the door of the shack where they lived. The spiritual, Christ-like Peter had gone out of the skinny, unwashed little body and crept into the coffin. There all these years he had snuggled in her arms. The poor, dead woman had crooned to her baby there in the grave-yard. The Peter of the District schools, the Peter who swore at teach- ers, stole everything he could lay his hands on and assaulted girls, was not Peter at all. Peter was in his mother's arms in her nameless grave. Fife gave the boy money to finish the cross, to buy paint and other trimmings. It was a work of art when it was done. There was a soul in it. One day the teacher and the boy went out together and cleared away the weeds from the grave. But for the setting up of the cross Peter went alone one Sunday. Cross of Gold IT LOOKS better than any of the others in the cemetery," he said when he came to school the next morning. "Do you think she knows about it? Do you think she will like it because it's wood and not stone?" "That cross is made of gold, Peter," the teacher said. "She will know it is made of gold." So the soul of Peter was raised from his mother's grave on the cross his hands had carved. "I have known many boys," says Mr. Fife, "but I never knew another so spiritually-minded as Peter is today. He is all spirit. And he is the one boy sent here for whom nobody had any hope." Fife hesitates to psycho-analyze this strange case of dual per- sonality in a child. One school would explain it perhaps in terms of mother fixa- tion twisted in some curious way. Another would find an inferiority complex — the motherless child, whom the world so despised that it would not even accord his mother the poor honor of a cross over her grave, developing a superiority complex in compensation which drove him to make the world pay attention to him by the very extent of his depravity, the way which offered the line of least resistance at the time. But the mystic would find here the symbols of holy and unseen things — of Christ descending into hell at the behest of the Mother. Perhaps all are right. Who knows?