The Braid Nobody in Town Understood
Then she leaned in to the microphone one more time, because she is her mother’s daughter and a job is a job.
“Our next song is ‘This Land Is Your Land.'”
She walked back and climbed to the top riser, at the end.
Miss Carol sat with her hands above the keys for what felt like a full minute. Then she played the opening, and thirty-one fifth graders started to sing, thin at first.
About halfway through the first verse, Kaylee Dunn stepped out of her spot in the front row, center. She climbed up through the risers, past the tall boys, to the end of the top one. She bent down and picked up the bottom of Hailey’s braid, ribbon and all, so it was not lying on the boards. And she stood there and held it, and sang.
I did not see the rest very well.
Nobody clapped when the song ended, not right away. Then an old farmer in the front, a man who had not said ten words to me in my life, stood up out of his folding chair. Then the row behind him.
I got Hailey out the side door as soon as it was over. I did not want anybody telling her she was brave, in that voice people use.
In the truck she sat with her knees up.
“Are you mad?” she asked.
“No ma’am.”
“I broke the rule.”
“It was never your rule. It was mine.” I started the engine and then did not put it in gear. “Your mama made it so you could quit without anybody seeing. I guess you don’t need it anymore.”
“I wasn’t ever going to quit.”
“I know. She didn’t know that. She only knew you at five.”
Hailey thought about that for a while, with the heater ticking.
“She said a thing about you,” she said. “Mrs. Dunn. About burying Mom.”
“I heard it.”
“That’s the part I couldn’t stand. The hair part I didn’t care.”
I reached over and put my hand on the top of her head, which I had not done since she was small.
We went home. Nobody called that weekend. On Sunday we sat in our regular pew, and I could feel the whole church not looking at us, which is its own kind of looking.
I thought that was the end of it.
I had not counted on the fifth grade.
Monday at ten in the morning, Miss Kim called the feedlot. Jeff came and got me from under a feed truck.
“School,” he said. “She says nothing’s wrong. She says you need to see something.”
I drove in with my welding cap still on.
Miss Kim met me at the front office. She walked me down the fifth grade hall and stopped outside the classroom door and said, “Just look.”
There are fourteen girls in the fifth grade at our school.
Every one of them had her hair in a single braid down her back.
Some had hair to their waists. Most did not. There was a girl with a bob who had a braid about as long as my finger, sticking straight out, held with four rubber bands. It did not matter. Fourteen braids.
On the wall beside the whiteboard somebody had taped up a long sheet of butcher paper. Across the top, in marker, it said Inches. Under that were fourteen names in fourteen handwritings, and beside each name, a number. A cloth sewing tape hung from a thumbtack next to it.