Why I hate Mackworth Island (continued) BY RICK WORMWOOD

Dr. Kelly was, by contrast, quiet. Though not the public personage that Youngs was, he did make his presence felt at the school. I can remember once visiting my sister’s class and being startled to see Dr. Kelly walking around the outside of the buildings, peering in at the students through the windows. Never could I imagine my own grade-school principal, Sister Theresa, the toughest Ursuline nun in the diocese, doing something so strange. When I asked my sister’s teacher about it, she said that Dr. Kelly walked around the school like that all the time.

There was also a telling piece of sign language that Kelly would flash to kids in class through the windows while making his exterior rounds. Former students say that he would just slightly lift his thumb before bringing it back down on top of his fist, which meant: "This is where I have you, under my thumb." It was all part of how he kept people frightened and quiet.

He was the spirit and driving force behind Mackworth Island’s secret culture of sexual abuse and its code of silence. And it wasn’t just Kelly devouring young boys, or Joe Youngs beating the crap out of whomever stepped out of line, or various other faculty and staff taking their cues from the top and acting in kind, although the public eventually learned that all of that happened. In a twisted version of trickle-down economics, the older students extended what had happened to them to the younger kids until the abuse touched nearly everybody. Then some of those kids brought it home from the island.

I know this from firsthand experience.

In 1980, soon after Sharon started commuting to Mackworth Island daily instead of sleeping in the dorm, when I was nine and she was 12, she came into my room late one night and turned on the light so that we could sign to one another. Sitting on my bed, she signed, "I want to show you something."

"What," I replied?

Then she pulled aside her nightgown to expose a breast and leaned forward, clearly aiming to stick that breast in my face. When I lurched away, practically climbing up the headboard, she grabbed my foot and pulled it between her legs, wanting me to stick my toes in her vagina. As I pushed her away she tried to overpower me, so the fight was on, but she didn’t want to escalate to a point that would have awakened our sleeping parents, so she quickly changed tactics and tried to convince me.

"No, no, you don’t understand," she kept repeating, "I want to show you something. You don’t understand. I want to show you something."

I pointed towards her room, signing "no" and insisting that she leave. After realizing that I would not acquiesce, Sharon stood up, called me fucking stupid and then returned to her bed, but there was no door between our two attic bedrooms, nothing to shut or lock between us to prevent her from returning, which she did most nights for the next few months. Sometimes, when I heard her coming, I’d turn on my light and send her back before she crossed the threshold; or I’d pretend to be asleep, so that after sitting on the edge of my bed and poking my shoulder a few times she’d give up. Often, she would hit the light herself, and then insist that she only wanted to show me something, that she was mad at me for being stupid, that I should just let her.

"Just let me," she would sign again and again. "I just want to show you something." These late-night encounters always ended with her stomping away, frustrated. To say that this freaked me out doesn’t even begin to get there. I was beyond freaked out. Why she would try something like that with me was beyond my nine-year-old ability to fathom.

Physically, things never progressed past the inelegant and immediately rebuffed bum’s rush of that first night, but they would have if she’d had her way. Those frightening evenings were the beginning of my life as a night owl. Sound sleep was hard to come by. I stayed up reading, or with one ear on her room and the other on a small radio. On most nights I made certain that she was sleeping soundly before relaxing enough to drift off myself.

Afraid of the consequences to her if I said anything, and also because I was a bewildered kid with no idea of where to begin, it took me 13 years to tell anybody what had happened, but even after telling my now-ex-wife two days before our wedding, the subject didn’t surface again until being discussed for 40 seconds in the summer of 1997. I remember it because it happened to be the night that Robert Mitchum died. July 1. That’s how I remember it. It was my deepest secret.

Within a year of what happened between my sister and me came February of 1981, when stories about the true conditions at the school hit the press. Coping, a state-published newsletter for the disabled, laid out the basic charges, and that was like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern. Over the next few weeks, the Press Herald got more specific. Dr. Youngs was accused of viciously beating students, including one well-documented time when he stabbed a student in the thigh with a pen to get his attention. Jan Repass, the Dean of Students, himself deaf, was accused of having sexual relations with teenage girls, and Dr. Kelly, well, what I told you about him before was just the tip of the iceberg. Governor Joe Brennan ordered the Attorney General to investigate, but all three men named in the news stories denied everything.

They tried to both fight the charges and to return to their jobs, but the blood was in the water. Too many other shoes kept dropping. The furor all of this caused dominated the papers for months. I had a Press Herald paper route at the time, and every morning as these things were exploding into public view I would sit on the steps of Sleeper’s Market, where I picked up my papers, and read the articles in the light of dawn, dreading to see just how much farther my world had splintered apart since the previous day.

As the allegations piled up, I was again at my mother’s side as she became involved in a parents organization that formed to oppose the school administration. In a strange way, this was one of the most exciting periods of my life. Always the only child sitting around crowded tables in various Portland bars or church basements, I listened in amazement as the adults plotted against our former heroes. It felt like we were joining a great rebellion, attempting to overthrow the great commanding power of our lives, but this participation and excitement eventually cost me my final bit of idealism.

First, Youngs, Kelly, and Repass resigned, which we thought was a great victory because it meant they had to vacate the school and island. But, to quote Attorney General James E. Tierney: "Because many of the incidents uncovered by the State investigators were beyond the statute of limitations, and other incidents were not clearly criminal violations under the current language of the Maine Criminal Code, and because of considerations for the emotional well-being of the victims, no criminal indictments will be sought by the State as a result of evidence compiled to date by this office."

That’s right. When the attorney general’s office issued their report, it was announced that no charges would be filed against anybody involved, not because the stories of abuse weren’t deemed credible, but because only people for whom the statute of limitations had expired were willing to testify. Any student that had been targeted recently was afraid to talk, so nobody responsible ever stood before a judge or jury.

If that seems hard to conceive of, consider this analogy: When the regime fell on Mackworth Island it was a lot like when Saddam Hussein’s government fell, in that right after it happened there were a lot of people going around Baghdad saying, "This storm will pass, and when it does, Saddam will be back, so keep your mouth shut and don’t help the infidels." Governor Baxter’s students had good reason to suspect that Kelly and Youngs might survive the accusations, because they had before. In the late 1970s, students had circulated a petition calling for Youngs and Kelly’s removal, which they sent to Augusta. A couple of days later, Dr. Youngs called a school assembly and ripped the petition up in front of everybody. Without giving its merits a second thought, Augusta had just turned it over to Dr. Youngs. Given that history, how could anyone from Augusta make the students feel safe enough to speak out? They could not.

Until learning that no one would go to jail for these crimes, I was completely naïve. I believed in truth, justice and the American Way. I was a Boy Scout in Saint Ignatius Parish Troop 327. I took my hat off during the National Anthem and rooted against Communist athletes on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Nothing in the world as I understood it had prepared me for the moment when I realized that nobody would be held responsible for the outrage at Governor Baxter. It was crushing. I was beyond devastated.