The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

“Then what do we do?”

“I’m working on it,” I said.

Our son-in-law, Clint, called at nine. He is a lineman, eleven hundred miles away in the Florida panhandle with a crew from our power co-op, standing the poles back up after the hurricane. Jenna had told him from a hallway at work. He said he was going to get in the truck and drive home that night.

“Don’t,” I told him. “You’ve got eleven men on your crew and a town with no lights. Nate needs his dad on the phone tonight more than he needs him in a gymnasium Friday. Just call him.”

He called. Nate took it in his room with the door shut, and it lasted an hour and ten minutes. When he came out for a glass of water his face looked steadier, like a boy who has been told something true by somebody with the right to say it.

I did not call the school. I want that understood, since I said I wouldn’t and Nate was listening for it. At ten past seven the next morning, with the coffee still dripping, the school called me.

Mr. Hoover, the principal, is a tired, decent man in his fifties who coached junior high wrestling for a decade before he took the office. Two parents had phoned him at home before seven, he said, and neither one was me.

“Joanne, I’m sick about it,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Monica today.”

“A word,” I said.

“Mrs. Lindgren has been here twenty-seven years. I have to be careful how I approach a thing like this. There’s a process.”

“The auditions are Friday at 3:15.”

“I’ll do what I can before then.”

I knew what he meant by it, because I would have meant the same in his chair. A word, a process, a meeting after the weekend. By then the auditions would be over, and Nate would have sat out the one thing he had spent six weeks of evenings getting ready for.

The process could not give him back Friday.

That was when I started thinking about the children.

Here is what I kept coming back to. Thirty-eight fifth graders heard that journal. Maybe six or eight laughed out loud, and one did the voice. The rest sat with their stomachs turning over, the way Addie Ruhl did, because a teacher was doing it and a teacher is not supposed to be wrong. And not one of those children had been asked, by anybody, what they thought of it. They had been told what the room was, and they had gone along.

I did not want to shame them. I wanted somebody who loved them to ask.

Nate got home on the bus at 3:45. I had planned what to say, and then I did not use any of it. I put a plate of crackers and cheese on the table, and I told him straight.

“I’m not going to the school. I’m not going to yell. But I’d like to call a few mothers tonight, the ones whose kids laughed, and ask each of them to put one question to their child at bedtime. That’s all.”

He looked at the crackers for a while.

“Will they know it was me?”

“They’ll know Gail called me. I won’t repeat a word you said to me.”