The Shoebox My Teacher Kept

Her Grade Book

Tucked down the side of the box, standing against the cardboard wall of it, was a grade book. Not the official one the district kept. Her own. A pocket ledger with a green cover, filled in pencil, soft at the spine.

I did not open it that day. I took the whole box home and set it on my kitchen table, and I made coffee I did not drink, and when it got dark I finally opened the grade book under the kitchen light.

It was not grades. Or it was, but it was more than grades.

She kept a column for every child, every year, and the ordinary marks were there, the reading levels and the arithmetic. But along the margins, in that tiny pencil hand, she kept a second record.

Next to some names there were little notes. “Coat,” one said, and a date, and a figure. Twelve dollars. Next to another, “Workbook and field trip, 4.50 and 3.00, do not send bill home.”

Do not send bill home. She had written that to herself, or to whatever version of herself opened the book next, so that no child would ever carry a slip to the door of a house that could not pay it.

She had paid it. Out of a teacher’s salary in a town like ours, she had quietly paid the book fees and the field-trip money and, more than once, a winter coat, and she had made sure the record of who could not pay never left her own green book.

I added it up one night, just the part of it that was written down. Over the years in that book it came to more than she could have afforded, which means the number I could see was smaller than the number that was real.

And there was the attendance. That was the part that made me put the book down and walk out into my own backyard at eleven at night.

She marked children present who were not present.

A child home sick for a week, a child whose mother was sick and needed the oldest home to mind the little ones, a child like me gone to a hospital for six weeks. In the official world that many absences could hold a child back a grade, or get a family a visit from the county, or just mark a kid in front of the whole class as the one who was always gone.

In her green book, next to those names, she wrote a small letter P and the truth underneath it in pencil so faint you had to tilt it to the light. “Present with me,” it said next to one. “Work carried,” next to another. Next to my own name, in January of my ninth year: “Present, carried, Tues and Thurs.”

She had driven my attendance to me. She had made sure that the year my body failed, the record would say I was there, because she had decided that a child who is being kept alive in a hospital is not absent from the fourth grade, she is simply holding class somewhere else.