A Scout is Reverent

Breaking Point at Summer Camp

Dear Republic,

Our next finalist for our short story competition is Eric Cyr’s “A Scout is Reverent.” I was drawn to this story for way it nails the painful social dynamics of summer camp—and the sense of consequence we really feel in moments we later look back on as formative. This one was really fun to read.

-Greta

A SCOUT IS REVERENT

On the first day of Scout camp that summer, while we were waiting in line for our medical checks, some of the older boys told us first years we were all going to get jabbed with The Big Square Needle as part of the mandatory campwide inoculation. Thomas acted like that didn’t scare him a bit, and maybe he fooled everyone else, but I knew him better than them and I could read the lie on his face. We were both terrified.

Thomas and I weren’t the only Tenderfoots that year, but I was closer with him than I was with any of the other boys. We’d been in Cub Scouts together for five years, and even though we weren’t especially close in school or outside scouts, we’d always stuck together at meetings and Jamboree and weekend campouts. We’d shared tents, stayed up late together, swapped jokes and stories and Skittles in the dark.

Well, all of us Tenderfoots worshiped the older boys, and they told us the needle was big and square and the most painful shot we’d ever get, a debilitating stab in the left cheek. To tell the truth, I was just as scared about dropping my pants in front of the nurse as I was about getting jabbed. As each boy came out of the medical cabin, he’d rub his backside, exaggerate a grimace, and tell us how bad it’d been.

“That thing’s a weapon of mass destruction,” Henrik moaned. “It can’t be legal.” He had white-blond hair and an Adam’s apple the size of an egg, seventeen and in his last year at camp.

Nathan, another last-year scout, looked me in the eyes and said, “Wait until you see the smile on her face when she gives you the prick. She’s sick like bin Laden.” Nathan, soft and fleshy and not much taller than me, made up for his lack of height with black bristling facial hair that sprouted in patches from his chin and lip and round cheeks. He’d stroke his dark little mustache when he laughed, a laugh so loud and sharp it froze you where you were and made you listen.

“Joshy,” he said, “you remember our first year, you were so scared you pissed yourself before going in? Tried to run off and hide in the woods?”

Joshua snapped his head up from the Boy Scout handbook he’d been reading. He was scrawny for seventeen, all sinew and bone. A few dark freckles dotted his nose. His jaw jutted forward and his ears were broad, almost like a chimp’s, but his hazel eyes were sharp, smart. Always working. He had his red Troop 87 T-shirt tucked behind a polished silver buckle into olive drab Scout shorts, his olive and red Scout socks pulled up over his calves. He sat alone at the far end of the long wooden bench.

His eyes flared wide, wild, like two knots in a rope pulled taut, and his chin twitched to the left, a tic he had that acted up sometimes. He took a sharp breath and said, “Remember how you cried for your mommy and tried to hump a raccoon like some kind of animal-fag?” His chin snapped left again, twice, quick.

Nathan laughed in a short humorless burst. “Calm down, buddy, we’re just messing with you.”

Joshua closed his eyes and leaned his head way back along the top of the backrest. His lips formed rapid words that only he could hear, another habit he had. I wasn’t sure if it was a tic or something else.

The door opened and Thomas stood to go in, which left me next in line. Thomas didn’t say anything, but he kept his head rigid and I could see the color drain from his ears.

“You think he’ll scream?” Nathan asked and laughed like you should be laughing too, only you couldn’t over the sound of his. He turned to me. “You want a size comparison before you go in? So you know what’s waiting for you?”

Henrik laughed and shook his long face like a mule. “Come on, Nathan, you’re scaring him.”

Joshua let out a scoff or a growl or a curse, I couldn’t tell which, and muttered something under his breath. Nathan glared at him for a second and then looked back at me.

I’m sure by then my eyes were as wide as an owl’s, my face red as sunburn. My shirt stuck to my back with sweat. Nathan looked like he was about to open his mouth and go on, but just then the door opened and spared me the enlightenment. Thomas limped out. He gave a long groan, but he couldn’t keep the smirk off his face.

“She’s a witch,” he said.

“A bitch,” Nathan said.

“Yeah, a bitch,” Thomas repeated.

Henrik and Nathan laughed. Thomas glowed. Of course we all knew those words, but I almost never heard Thomas use them. Not like that. He looked at me with a cruelness on his face I’d never seen there before and said, “She’s gonna make you cry like a little bitch.” I wished I could curse back at him, but my mouth was dry and I couldn’t force the words out to match his sudden meanness. Joshua kept his eyes closed but dug a heel into the dirt at the end of the bench and ran his tongue over words we couldn’t hear.

My heart hammered and I stepped into the cabin for my shot. The nurse could see right away how scared I was and asked, “Your first year?” and I said yes. Then she asked, “They been telling you about a square needle?” and when I said yes, she scoffed and said, “Don’t you listen to that nonsense. Don’t pay it any mind.” And the way she smiled, I shook my head and told her, No ma’am, I wouldn’t.

* * *

That night we set up our tents by patrol. Cobra, Panther, Fox, Stag, each in our own little clearing. Thomas and I were the youngest boys in Cobra. The older ones were supposed to teach us how to be good scouts and upstanding men—set em on the right path, Mr. Larson said. Nathan and Henrik each had their own tent, and Thomas and I were setting ours up on the other side of the clearing.

“Over here, Tommy, next to us,” Nathan said. Thomas beamed, scooped up our tent rods and ran over to where Nathan pointed. He didn’t even glance at me. I followed, clutching the rest of the tent in billows against my chest.

“This your first campout?” Henrik asked.

“No,” Thomas answered and dropped the rods with a clatter. “We did a few in Cub Scouts. Never a whole week, though.”

“Say something funny,” Nathan said, tying the rain fly over his tent.

Thomas said something vulgar and Nathan laughed. “Where’d you learn those dirty words? You swear like that all the time?”

Thomas said he did and swore again, just a lot of words strung together, and Nathan and Henrik laughed. I wished they would laugh at something I said, but I couldn’t think of anything clever and couldn’t bring myself to curse like Thomas did.

Marcus and Adam were in a tent next to ours, then Joshua’s was already set up at the end of the line. He was back at the center of the campsite, sitting by a fire he’d built and whittling long slices off a branch. That night in the tent I tried to talk to Thomas about the needle, but he scoffed and said he’d never believed it was real, he just played along to fool me and the other Tenderfoots. Then he rolled over and we didn’t talk any more.

On Monday we settled into camp routine. Isaiah from Fox Patrol woke us up with Reveille at six for flag raising. Nathan led prayer as our troop chaplain—some of the other boys had voted him into that role the year before as a joke Mr. Larson couldn’t stop—then we had breakfast. After that, most of us got ready to scatter throughout the camp for merit badge classes. The younger scouts had signed up for pretty full days, but most of the older boys didn’t need or care much about merit badges anymore. Joshua already had his Eagle Scout and three palms, so he’d gone off into the woods on his own to set up a lean-to and hunt for grouse with his spear. I think he had some personal list of things he wanted to do his last year at camp. Henrik and Nathan set up hammocks in our campsite and rolled a log into the center of the clearing to throw knives at. Looked to me like their list was a lot simpler.

Thomas and I were signed up for the Reptiles and Amphibians merit badge at eight. I was ready to go, waiting for him by the fire pit while he finished washing his mess kit, when I heard Henrik’s voice call from his hammock over by the tents.

“You going to a merit badge?”

“Yeah,” Thomas answered, though already it sounded like a question.

“Why don’t you stay here with us?”

“Yeah?” Thomas said again, the question in his voice clearer this time: you mean it?

“You can pull our knives from the log and have a turn throwing. We’ll give you an extra buck for a slushie if you run to the commissary for us.”

I knew Thomas would be sold on that even before he called out to me, “Go ahead, I’m gonna hang back here for a while. I’ll meet up with you for Astronomy.”

I hesitated a second then said, “I could stay back with you.”

“No,” he shot. “You go.” So I dug a line into the dirt with my toe, stuck my hands in my pockets, and started off alone for the Nature Center.

Thomas never met up with me for any merit badge classes that day or the next. I hung around with some of the other boys and played cards in the evenings, but I spent a lot of hours those days feeling lonely and homesick. In the afternoons I found stacks of empty slushie cups littering our campsite.

* * *

Wednesday night after dinner was chapel. We all lined up at dusk and marched down to the lake, then along a narrow trail that followed the water’s edge. Sumac trees, overburdened with bunches of tiny red blooms, lined the trail. You could hear the loons across the water, crying out their melancholic, almost human call, like a kid lost in the woods. Frogs croaked in the shallows, and now and then you’d hear the splash of one jumping from the shore, or of a Northern nipping one from the surface.

You were supposed to be silent on the way to chapel, but everyone was talking, mostly quietly for a while, until someone made a joke and Nathan’s laugh carried above all the other chatter clear across the lake.

“Quiet,” Joshua snapped. Since he was our patrol leader, I guess it was his job if it was anybody’s to say something.

“Sir, yes, sir, sorry, sir,” Nathan called back, louder than he’d been before. Henrik and Thomas and a few of the other boys laughed.

“Come on, Nathan, enough,” Joshua hissed.

Nathan blew a loud raspberry, which even I thought was pretty bad for a seventeen-year-old. A bunch of the boys were laughing, though, and at that point anything would have set them off.

I could see Joshua was getting worked up. He rattled off in one breath, “A Scout is trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent,” digging into the last word like a preacher. The other boys only laughed harder. “For God’s sake, shut your mouths and show some reverence,” he said.

“Who’s the damn chaplain around here?” Nathan snapped back with a straight face.

I could feel Joshua’s anger building up in my own shoulders, but before he could answer, Thomas said, “Hey guys, come on, show some damn reverence. We’re going to chapel.”

The boys howled, and I thought Joshua’s soul was going to rise up from his body and come crashing down on them. I heard him take a breath like he was getting ready to scream at Thomas, but just then the woods opened up and we reached a clearing with a little slope like an amphitheater. The camp counselors stared at us all in a line, and under their eyes we fell silent. We followed their directions to our row and sat down in the dewy grass.

Once all the troops were settled in, the counselors, armed with a couple guitars and a mandolin, led songs for an hour of the most ecumenical, camp-ready chapel service you ever saw. We sang one song about all God’s critters having a place in His choir—I still remember the chorus, which even managed to rhyme choir with higher—and one everybody knows about Brother Noah and the Ark. One about a blind man sitting on the side of the road, begging for rest. He begs and cries and then meets Jesus there on the road, and the song ends with Jesus telling him, “I am the way to go home.” You never hear if the man follows him in the end, or if he’d rather just stay there and keep moaning like he always had.

Everybody talked and laughed and yelled across the empty lake while we walked back to our site. I couldn’t tell you if the loons were still calling or the frogs singing—we were all so loud I couldn’t have heard them if they were. I shouted nonsense with the rest of them, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from watching Joshua, either. He walked a little ways ahead of the group and didn’t even try to quiet us down.

* * *

Thursday, merit badges, archery range, buying candy from the commissary like only a kid with more freedom than he’s used to can. More slushie cups, dirt and long dead pine needles stuck to the sugary remnants, lying around the hammocks in our campsite.

That night we had the camp Olympics. We marched with our patrol to every campsite and competed in different events organized by each troop. Ax throwing, tug of war, fire building, obstacle race, lashing. Christmas caroling with one troop who must have thought themselves the camp clowns.

We sang “Silent Night,” and I was surprised at how good we sounded. I’d heard Joshua and Adam singing at chapel, but the other boys had been quiet there, and I didn’t know they had it in them. Thomas had a nice clear tenor, and I think Henrik shocked all of us when he came in with that perfect bass line underneath it all. Even the boys who were running the station, who’d all been giggling when they explained the event to us, fell quiet, and the smirks dropped off their faces. Everything went calm, and they just listened.

After we finished singing, we stayed mostly quiet ourselves, even all the way to the next campsite. The troop there did Boy Scout trivia, and we figured we’d win that one easily because Joshua sat around and read up on this stuff just for fun.

“Joshy, this is what you’ve been training for,” Henrik said, and Nathan laughed.

Joshua smiled a little, crooked, like he wasn’t sure if they were teasing him or not. Then the questions started, and boy, he knew his stuff.

They started out pretty easy, questions that most of us knew, like the scout motto and scout knot and scout oath. Then they got a little harder, and while the rest of us were still thinking, Joshua rattled off answers. How many campsites were there in the whole camp, how many merit badges was it possible for a scout to earn, which U.S. president was an Eagle Scout.

All this time Joshua kept his head straight forward, his eyes half closed in thought. The rest of us cheered and slapped his back after each answer, but his focus never shook.

The boy reading the questions looked up at us. “This next one’s as far as any other patrol made it. Two more questions and you’re in first.” I could feel my body tense with nerves, but Joshua just stared ahead the same as before. “What day did Baden Powell publish the first part of Scouting For Boys and launch Boy Scouts?”

Not one of us spoke. I knew who Baden Powell was—every scout did—but I couldn’t tell you what decade Scouts started, let alone the day and year. Joshua closed his eyes all the way and his lips started working.

“What is it, Josh?” Henrik said.

“What’s the answer?” Nathan said louder.

Joshua looked at the boy and smiled. You could see it in his eyes that he knew. “January 24, 1906.”

The boy reading the question shook his head. “Right day, wrong year,” he said over the sound of our groans. “1908.”

“No,” Joshua shot back, “that’s not right. 1906. It’s 1906.”

The boy shook his head again. “Check your history.” He shoved a book into Joshua’s hands.

Joshua darted his eyes across the page before he shut the book with a snap and dropped it into the dirt. The other boy bent to pick it up, brushed it off, and grumbled about Joshua being a bad sport.

“Come on, Josh,” Nathan said, “what’d we bring you for?”

“You had one job, Joshy,” Thomas whined, and Joshua’s face was like a fire. His freckles darkened on his nose and he stared at the book in the boy’s hand like he expected it to change its answer.

“Come on,” Henrik said. “Next site. Let’s go.”

We took off down the wide trail, and Joshua lagged a little behind us to the next game at Crow site. I kept looking back at him, but I stuck up with the main group. I wished I had any idea what to do.

At Crow, Troop 134 hosted a balancing tug of war game. The older boys all knew how to play, but I’d never seen it before. The senior patrol leader from Troop 134 described the rules: one boy from each team would stand on a stump holding opposite ends of a length of rope and try to stay standing while maneuvering the other boy off his log. Each boy in our patrol would take a turn.

I saw Joshua getting jittery while the boy explained the rules. “I don’t want to play,” I heard him mutter, “I won’t play,” but nobody else was listening.

“I’ll go first,” Nathan said and slapped his chest.

He scooped up the end of the rope and mounted his stump. When the other troop’s scoutmaster said Go! Nathan gathered up a stretch of the loose cord with three quick pulls, coiled it around his hand, then tugged hard on the taut line. The other boy leaned forward, pulled almost off his feet, but regained his balance. He shot his arms backward with a wild jerk, but Nathan was ready and let go of four or five feet of rope. The line went slack, and the force of the boy’s own pull sent him toppling off the back of the log.

“Winner,” the scoutmaster called and pointed an arm toward Nathan. “One point to Troop 87, Cobra Patrol.” Everyone cheered but Joshua, who continued his voiceless babble.

Henrik stepped up on the stump next and finessed his way to our second point. Joshua was next in line but his chin jerked to the left and he pushed Thomas toward the stump.

“You go,” he said, so Thomas hopped up and survived a good amount of back and forth before the other boy yanked him down into the dirt. He came up brushing his knees and cursing.

“Language, son,” the scoutmaster said. Nathan laughed and patted Thomas’s back.

“Good fight, shrimpie,” he said. “You got balls.”

Next I lost, and Thomas said, “Come on!” which I thought was pretty unfair given the circumstances, but I knew saying anything would only make it worse. Then Marcus won and Adam lost. Tied three to three, Joshua was the last one up.

“I don’t like this game,” he said. “Skip me.”

“Everyone else went,” Henrik said. “You’re up. Come on.”

“Someone else can go again,” Joshua insisted, and his chin snapped.

“I’ll go,” Nathan said. “Gimme that rope.”

The other troop protested, and the scoutmaster shook his head and said no, every boy takes a turn. “Come on, son, give it a try. It’s just a game.”

“But I don’t like the game,” Joshua seethed. He was turning red, his eyes darting side to side, not meeting anyone’s gaze. “I don’t want to play.”

“Don’t worry about the outcome. Just have fun.”

“I told you, I won’t have fun. I don’t care about the outcome, I don’t want to play. I won’t play.”

“All right,” the scoutmaster answered, his thick jaw and grey eyes set like a guy who wasn’t used to giving any ground in a fight. “You forfeit, then?”

“Yes,” Joshua said, while Nathan and Henrik both shouted, “No.”

“Just give us a second,” Henrik said to the scoutmaster, who cocked his head but didn’t speak. Henrik turned to Joshua. “Come on, Joshy, we need you. You can do this.”

“No,” he answered, “I can’t. I don’t care. I won’t.” His fists clenched and released over and over and his chin was twitching out an irregular pulse. I wanted to tell them all to stop, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t, I guess is more true—open my mouth.

“Now or never, boys,” the scoutmaster said.

Joshua’s jaw clenched and ticked and his face was slick with sweat.

“Just do it,” Nathan said. “Don’t be a bitch.”

“Language, boys.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. He shoved Joshua from the side with both hands. His voice, an octave higher, matched Nathan’s for scorn. “Don’t be such a bitch.”

“Boys!”

You could see something snap in Joshua right then, see it in his fists and the flash of his hazel eyes, something that had been winding up and winding up and finally broke. He jumped up on Thomas’s back and wrapped one bony arm around his neck. The wiry muscles of his forearm strained and a vein popped near his wrist. Thomas collapsed under the weight of this sudden attack. He kicked and scraped the earth and tried to turn over, but Joshua held tight and they squirmed in the dirt like a pair of snakes entwined.

This all took only an instant, but Thomas’s face was turning a bright cardinal red and his eyes bulged white and round like a frog’s before the scoutmaster reacted and grabbed Joshua’s arm in his two huge hands. He crushed Joshua’s wrist and pried his arm away from Thomas’s throat.

Joshua fell, alone, into the dirt. When he looked up, his face was nearly black where the dirt had smeared on his wet eyes and cheeks and nose. He let out a stream of disconnected obscenities, and before anyone could grab him or say anything, he took off into the woods with a howl.

We were all pretty stunned until Thomas started to cry and the scoutmaster crouched down to check him over. His neck was still red, but he was all right, his face returning to its normal color, gasping big wild breaths now and sobbing like a little kid. Which, I guess, he was, and you could see it then clear that yes, that’s just what he was, for all his four-letter words and vulgar jokes and swagger, he was a little kid, we all were, even Henrik with his egg-sized Adam’s apple and Nathan with his coarse black beard that looked sparser than I’d ever noticed before.

Between lingering sobs, Thomas said he was fine but his neck hurt. Someone from the other troop said “No shit” and the scoutmaster didn’t even say boys or language, just asked, “Where’d that boy run off to?” None of us knew, so he said two of us better run down to the camp commissioner’s office and let him know, and the rest of us better get Thomas back to our own scoutmaster.

Back at our campsite we told Mr. Larson what had happened and checked for Joshua in his tent. He wasn’t there, so Mr. Larson and the parents who were at camp stepped away from us boys and talked in hurried, hushed voices while we waited by the fire.

Mr. Larson was about the most relaxed adult I knew, so it was unnerving to see the way he kept taking off his cap, running his hand through his trim brown hair; to hear his voice, always rich and steady and deep, waver when he spoke. I only overheard bits of their conversation, but it didn’t do anything to calm my nerves: could be anywhere . . . I didn’t think he’d . . . a thousand acres of forest.

We were all quiet for a while, watching the flames, listening to them hiss and crackle, until Nathan made a sound in his throat like a car engine dying and said, “What a spaz.”

Henrik grunted and spit onto an ashen log in the fire. The saliva sizzled and smoked over glowing orange coals at the log’s center and formed a dark, cool circle. “God damn,” he said, in a voice like he wasn’t sure what the words meant, or what he meant by them. Thomas just rubbed his neck and stared into the fire, and I kept my mouth shut like I always did.

“Let’s go, boys,” Mr. Larson said behind us. “Grab a flashlight.”

We broke up into threes—two boys and one adult—and headed out to cover the fifteen or twenty miles of the campground’s trails. Mr. Larson told us not to leave our partners or leave the trail for any reason, but if we found Joshua to stay with him, don’t leave him alone, and try to bring him back to the site. “But don’t, for God’s sake, get lost out there yourself.”

I partnered up with Marcus Grunewald and his dad, and we took the trail toward the climbing wall, all of us quiet and tense and trying to pretend we weren’t scared.

The woods filled our silence with sound and life. Branches snapped as some animal in the darkness, a raccoon or a grouse, ruffled through the brush. The loons called over and over across the lake, lost, disembodied voices, and fireflies spun incandescent loops ahead of us on the trail. Overhead, the stars flickered their constellations, and the gibbous moon shone so bright we didn’t need our flashlights.

Away from the fire, I could feel the cold damp of the night rolling under my collar, into my ribs. I thought about what I’d heard Mr. Larson saying, about a thousand acres of forest. I’d been lost once in a state park a couple years before. Wandered off looking for a marshmallow stick and couldn’t find my way back. I’m sure I would’ve been found eventually even if I hadn’t roamed by luck into a neighboring campground, but I got so scared. It felt like I was out there for hours, even though it was probably only ten or fifteen minutes. Since then I’d been terrified of being lost in the woods, of anyone being lost in the woods, of dying ten feet from a trail because I was so turned around and scared and gave up the will to go on. That’s what I kept thinking about happening to Joshua as I walked the trail and tried not to let Marcus and Mr. Grunewald know that I was crying.

We walked four or five miles with barely a word passed between us. Mr Grunewald was praying; I could hear the murmur of supplications on his lips. He didn’t ask me or Marcus to pray with him, and I don’t know if it was a prayer we could’ve said together anyway.

At the end of two hours we got back to our campsite and found most of the troop sitting around the fire. Joshua had snuck back into his tent sometime while we were all out looking. One of the Tenderfoots heard him snoring when he came back from the trail, checked inside Joshua’s tent and found him stretched out, stripped to his boxers, on top of his sleeping bag. Mr. Larson decided it was better not to wake him up just yet. He set up his camp chair at the door of the tent and sat there all night waiting so he’d know when Joshua got up.

Knowing Joshua was found, safe, I curled up inside my own bag and slept.

* * *

When I crawled out of my tent in the morning, Joshua was already gone. His parents drove all night to pick him up. He finished Scouts that year and that was the last time I saw him.

At breakfast, Thomas sat next to me for the first time that week. He said, “Morning,” and I said, “Morning,” and then we were mostly quiet and he kept his eyes down on his plate while we ate french toast and sausage. We went to our merit badge classes together, even though it was too late for him to earn any, and he bought me a slushie and Skittles after lunch. We talked about the Twins and if they really should have traded Mientkiewicz and I was glad he was there with me.

That night was the camp-wide cookout and closing bonfire. We ate fat pink hot dogs and soft boiled corn on the cob and piles of pork beans that the camp counselors served while asking with a grin if we’d hunted any snipe or used the left-handed smoke shifter. After dinner we walked the trail back to the chapel clearing. Between two big log cabin fires, the camp commissioner said some final words. He recapped major events of the week—scoutmaster cookout, relay race, the Olympics—handed out camp awards and superlatives, made inside jokes from our days at camp. He prayed thanks for the beauty of the woods, for everyone who had spent the week there.

It felt wrong that he summarized the week without a mention of what had happened the night before, but of course he couldn’t. Still, to leave it out, whatever the reason, felt like telling a lie.

After the commissioner’s address, the counselors walked out and stood in a line between the two bright fires and sang to Taps, Day is done, gone the sun…all is well, safely rest…God is nigh. We all filed out back to the dark trail in silence.

Even the loons had gone quiet.

Eric Cyr is a writer, musician, and teacher from Duluth, Minnesota. With his band Cyr and the Cosmonauts, he has released two albums of original music. He serves as Assistant Executive Editor for Dappled Things, and his debut collection of short stories, Here It Snows in June, will be published by Wiseblood Books in June 2026.