The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed

The bee

Josie walked up the three steps and across the stage. She stood at the microphone, which Piper had set for a taller girl, and reached up and lowered it a notch. She was very small up there. I could see her shoulders rise and fall.

“Room 14, Josie Meyer,” Mrs. Brower said. “Your first word is ‘orchard.'”

Her thumb went at her side.

“O.”

A pause.

“R.”

A pause.

“C. H. A. R. D.”

“That is correct.”

Somebody in the back said, “There she goes.” It was Lyle.

I am not going to give you every round. The spellers dropped out one by one, a sixth grader on “silhouette,” a girl from Room 3 on “receive,” which she knew, but she was shaking too hard to get the order right. Josie spelled “harvest,” “stubborn,” and “horizon.” She blocked three times on the first letter of a word and tapped, and the gym held still, and each time the letter came.

On the fifth round she blocked for more than twenty seconds. I counted along with her thumb. And somewhere around the seventeenth second I heard a sound from the back wall, soft and steady, like a man knocking at a door he did not want to wake anybody behind.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

It was Orville Tate’s cane, on the gym floor.

He had not been asked. He did not look at anyone. He simply stood with his enormous hands on the crook of his cane and gave her the beat, the slow plain beat of a man who had waited a lifetime for somebody to wait for him.

Then Lyle, in the fourth row, put his boot heel down on the wood. Tap. Then Bud. Then Roy, and Dottie with her knuckles on the back of the folding chair in front of her, soft as moths.

Nobody planned it. It was just that the sound was there, and a hundred and forty people understood what it was for.

Josie heard it. I watched her hear it. Her head came up. Her thumb stopped, because she did not need it anymore.

“Q,” she said. A clean, round letter, the first of “queasy,” and the whole gym let out its breath.

She spelled it through to the end.

By the ninth round there were two children left on the stage: Josie, and Cole Hendricks, a sixth grader from Room 11 with a cowlick and a quiet, steady face. Cole missed “separate.” He put an “e” where the “a” belongs, the way half this county does, and Mrs. Brower said gently, “That is incorrect.”

If Josie spelled the word correctly, she would need one more to win.

“Separate,” Josie said, and began to tap. The gym began to tap with her.