Chapter 5. The Pits
When the night was pitch-black, we strolled down to the church-yard. There was no one around. Win pulled on the side door to the Parish Hall, and it silently opened, as his book of matches fell to the ground. Barely able to contain our laughter, we closed the door behind us and fumbled around in the darkness to get the Army cots. Of course, neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight, but we knew where the cots were, and our eyes gradually got accustomed to the dark, so, in about ten minutes, we had four of the cots pulled out and leaning against the outside of the building. We would have to get the blankets another time, so we picked up the match book and re-locked the door. Now came the hard part.
Win went first, holding the ends of two cots in each hand, with me holding the other ends. He insisted that we had to carry all four at once, or we would risk somebody finding them if we left two behind, or worse, we would be seen and get caught if we took too much time. I agreed it was worth a try. Trouble was, although he was four inches shorter than I, Win was way stronger, and what was an easy task for him was agony for me.
We headed down the sloped lawn to Lincoln Street and took a left. I fell for the first time crossing Prospect Street, and scraped one of my knees pretty good. I got up quickly and picked up the cots again, and we headed down the little hill towards the railroad crossing. I fell again before we reached it.
“Jesus, Denny!” Win whispered urgently, with a mixture of disgust and sympathy, “We’ve got to keep moving!” He suggested we try putting the ends of the cots on our shoulders and carrying them that way. Now my shoulders hurt like Hell, but it was a little easier.
We crossed to Old Colchester Road. So far, not a single car had passed us. We had to make it to the sand pits. There was no way we could get the cots out to our dig that night, so we planned to hide them at the pits and bring them into the woods the next day. A lot of kids played at the pits, even though most of our parents had declared it “off-limits,” so we couldn’t leave them there long. I had an alternate route to the dig by way of the pits, so I could show the guys how to get there without being seen.
We saw headlights at one point, and had to scramble. We dropped the cots in the ditch and lay down on top of them, hoping we couldn’t be seen. The car went past without seeing us, as far as we could tell, and we got up and continued on. When we got off the road, I begged for a stop to rest. Win didn’t want to stop, but he relented, just for a couple minutes. Then we picked them up again and trekked the last fifty yards or so into the safety of the sand pits.
We had to stash the cots somewhere until tomorrow and hope no one would find them. It was going to be hard enough explaining getting home after ten on a Saturday night, but we were good enough liars to figure something out, even with my scraped knees. But there was no way we could get out of going to church Sunday morning; we’d have to be practically dead. So we wouldn’t be able to move the cots until after one o’clock Sunday afternoon. We found a place to stash them; not perfect, but not immediately visible, either. Then we each headed home to face the music.
The next day, we met at the pits at about one-thirty. Win had managed to get his brother Jimmy to come along, and Larry showed up a few minutes later. The cots were still where we had left them, and it was a lot easier with four guys rather than two. I led the way, because I had used the route many times. It was mostly open fields, with lots of rocks, small trees and shrubs. There was one fence to climb, one small brook to cross, but mostly easy going. Best thing was, we were nowhere visible from any houses.
When we reached the woods, I steered them towards my path, which brought us shortly to known territory. When we reached the dig, Tom and Rollo and Roy were waiting for us, and there was quite a celebration over our scrounging coup. Win and I were pretty proud of ourselves, I must say. We explained that we would get the blankets next Saturday; that should be a lot easier.
“What about pillows?” Rollo asked.
We looked at each other, Win and I, trying to remember if we had seen any pillows in the storeroom. Neither of us could remember, but we figured, if there weren’t, we would get enough extra blankets that we could use rolled up blankets in place of pillows. It looked like there were hundreds of blankets on those shelves.
The rest of that day, we spent carrying and planning, mostly. There were lots of two-by-fours at Karl’s drop-off spot, and a few sheets of half-inch plywood. Those things were heavy, but we had enough guys to make it a manageable task. There was a little bit of digging to do, but that was quick work, and we talked a lot about the floor.
We figured we’d better rake the dirt even in the bottom of the pit before we put the floor down. Someone suggested that we ought to get some gravel to spread in the bottom, and it sounded like a good idea, but we had no way to get that much gravel, so we abandoned that idea. We were all vaguely aware that carpenters put great store in the concept of “level,” but none of us knew exactly why, so we abandoned that, too. We made a lot of decisions and compromises of that sort in the process of our construction, based mostly on a couple of facts: we didn’t have the time or the skill to make it perfect, and it wasn’t going to have to last that long anyway.
The floor was going down first, that much was decided, and we would build the walls one at a time and drop them in. Tom pointed out that we were going to be living on this floor, and it was going to get trashed in the process of all the subsequent work we would be doing in the pit. We decided we’d better put a tarp down to cover the floor as soon as it was in place.
The next day was our first real carpentry day, other than Rollo’s latrine. With saws and hammers flying, lots of mistakes and re-dos, banged thumbs and scratches, and not a little cursing, we ended up after a couple of hours with a twelve-by-twelve frame of two-by-fours. Extremely proud of ourselves, we celebrated with potato chips and soda, followed by a special treat of Ring-Dings, provided by our scrounging experts, Jimmy and Larry.
The day’s work was capped off by our nailing down the three sheets of plywood we had on hand; we would have to wait for Karl’s next raid to finish it.