The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

I said nothing. There was nothing in me to say that she hadn’t said better.

“I looked at the clock on Friday,” she said. “I did it in front of everyone, and a boy from my own room had to tell him to take his time.” She held out the paper sack. “I don’t know if it’s all right to give him this. It’s an old field guide. Birds of Iowa. I’ve had it since my father. He keeps a list of the feeder birds in that notebook, and I saw it when I had it in my hands.”

“You can ask him,” I said.

I turned and opened the screen door and called down the hall. “Nate. Mrs. Lindgren’s on the porch. You don’t have to come out.”

There was a long quiet. Then his voice, from his room, perfectly smooth. “She can leave it.”

“She heard you,” I said.

Mrs. Lindgren nodded. She set the sack on the porch rail, and then she held out the envelope, and I took it. It had his name on the front in a teacher’s handwriting, blue ink, upright and careful.

“Please give him that when he’s ready,” she said. “And please tell him he does not have to answer it.”

She went back down the walk. I watched the Oldsmobile back out onto the road, very slowly, and go.

I gave the envelope to Nate that afternoon without a word. He took it out to the barn. When he came back an hour later it was gone from his hands, and the bird book was gone from the porch rail, and I did not ask for either. I do not know what the letter said. I do not need to. It was his.

He did show me the journal. That was the Saturday after, at the kitchen table, on his own. He slid it across without a word, opened to a page near the front, and went out to the barn.

It was in his careful block printing, with a bird drawn in the corner.

“I know all the words,” he had written. “They are all in my head, in order, every one. When I say them to Mabel they come out in order too. The trouble is only the door. The door is my mouth. Mabel does not make me hurry. I like that about her. When I am a man I will be somebody who does not make people hurry. I will wait for anybody. I think that is a kind of job.”

And below it, in smaller letters:

“Someday I want to say one whole sentence in front of people and have it come out the way it sounds in my head. Just once. Then I will know that it can.”

I put the notebook down. I put my forehead down on the kitchen table, on top of my arms, and I stayed like that for a while with the clock ticking.

When I could, I went out to the barn. Nate was sitting on an overturned bucket in the end stall with Mabel’s head over the gate and the field guide open on his knee.

“Did you read it? Was it okay?”

“It was the best thing I ever read, Nate.”

“It’s just a journal.”

“It’s a boy telling the truth,” I said.

He scratched the cow a while. “Grandma? Do you think I’ll get stuck at the play?”