The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

“Probably on Founder,” I said.

“Probably,” he said, and he almost grinned. “I’m going to get stuck on ‘Mister,’ too. I’m going to get stuck on a lot of them.”

“Then you’ll get stuck,” I said. “And we’ll wait.”

The Christmas program was the Thursday night before the break, with snow coming down sideways past the gym windows and the folding chairs filled and people standing along the back wall in their boots. Grandmothers had brought thermoses. Farmers had left their trucks running in the lot.

Clint came home for it. His crew had been relieved the week before, and he had driven two days straight, and he walked into the gym at 6:50 in his work jacket with his hard hat still under his arm. He sat in the front row between Jenna and me. She held his arm in both of hers.

Nate was Bob Cratchit, in a brown vest of Doyle’s cut down by Gail Ruhl and a muffler to his knees. He stuck on the third word of his first line. The gym went still. I did not hear anyone whisper, and I did not hear anyone cough. Mr. Hartman, at the piano, held one soft chord under the silence and let it ring until Nate got there, and then he let it go.

When Nate came to the Founder of the Feast he stuck again, and the F came free, and his voice went up on it, and the chair behind me creaked as somebody sat back.

I looked once toward the back of the gym. At the very last row, by the stage door, one chair sat apart from the others, and Mrs. Lindgren was in it, in her good gray coat. She had asked to sit there, Mr. Hartman told me afterward. Not where she had always sat, up front where the director goes. At the back, to watch.

She did not come to find us afterward. I did not look for her. I saw her put her coat on and go out through the side door before the lights were all the way up.

Nate took his bow with the others. Then he found us in the front row and ran down the little steps in his muffler and hit his father in the chest so hard that Clint’s hard hat fell off his knee and rolled across the floor.

“I got stuck on Founder,” Nate said into his father’s jacket.

“I heard,” Clint said. “I heard every word.”

“Nobody laughed.”

“I know, buddy.”

The next morning the snow had stopped and the feeder was full of birds. I came into the kitchen at six with the kettle, and Nate was already at the table in his pajamas with the green notebook open in front of him and the field guide propped against the sugar bowl.

He did not hear me. He was looking out the window with a pencil in his mouth. A junco landed on the feeder, then another, and he took the pencil out and bent over the page.

He wrote the date. He wrote junco. After it he wrote the number two, and then, after a moment, he drew a line under it, firm, with the side of his hand against the paper to keep the line straight.

I put the kettle on very quietly, and I let it take its time.