The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

Gail Ruhl called at 8:15 on a Tuesday night, and I answered with a dish towel in one hand and a roasting pan in the other.

We sing alto side by side at First Lutheran, Gail and I, and have for twenty-two years. She does not call after supper unless somebody has died or something close to it. So I set the pan in the sink and said hello, and she said, “Joanne, are you sitting down?”

I was standing at the sink. I sat on the step stool we keep by the pantry.

“Addie came home from school and wouldn’t eat,” Gail said. “I thought she was coming down with something. Then she told me why.”

I listened. I will tell it once here, plainly, the way Gail told it to me, and then I am going to leave it alone, because my grandson has had to carry it a lot longer than I have had to say it.

That afternoon both fifth-grade rooms had been pushed together in Mrs. Lindgren’s classroom for the Christmas play sign-up, thirty-eight children on the carpet and in the desks. Right in the middle of it, Mrs. Lindgren walked over and took a green spiral notebook off Nate’s desk. It was his writing journal. On the first day of fifth grade she had told every child in that school that nobody would ever read those journals but the child who wrote it, and she had sent a note home to say so. I had signed it. It was in the kitchen drawer with the take-out menus.

She read it out loud to all thirty-eight of them.

She read the part where he wrote that he practices his lines in our barn, to a Jersey cow named Mabel, because Mabel never laughs. A few of the children laughed at that, and she let them. Then a boy in the back did Nate’s voice, the way it gets stuck on a first word, and more of them laughed, and she did not stop that either.

Then she closed the notebook and said, “Nate, honey, auditions are Friday. I want you to think hard about whether you really want to stand up there and make a whole gym full of people wait.”

She set the notebook back on his desk, squared up with the edge, the way you return a library book. Then she went on with the sign-up sheet.

“Addie said he didn’t look up,” Gail told me. “He just sat there with his hands under his legs.”

I thanked her. I don’t remember saying it. I hung up and sat there on the step stool with the water running in the sink, and I thought about a good many things I could do, and I thought about all of them for about ten seconds.

Then I got up and went down the hall.

Nate’s door was open a few inches. He is ten and has stuttered since he was three, and he lives with us Monday through Friday while his mother works nights at the care center in Charles City. He was lying on top of his bedspread with his sneakers still on, looking at the ceiling. The green notebook was on his chest, both hands flat on top of it, the way you’d hold a lid on a pot.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked. He didn’t turn his head.