The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed
I cannot tell the rest of it with a steady hand.
“S. E. P. A. R. A. T. E.”
“That is correct,” Mrs. Brower said, and her voice caught. She cleared her throat. She turned a page with fingers that were not quite steady.
“The championship word is ‘rhythm.'”
There was a sound in that gym, a small, strangled, delighted sound, part laugh and part sob, from about forty people at once. I will not pretend I did not hear the joke in it. Mrs. Brower had a list, not a sense of humor, and I swear to you she had no idea. But Walt, if he is anywhere, was laughing.
“Rhythm,” Josie said.
She turned her head, just slightly, toward the back wall where an old man stood with a cane. Then she looked at me.
“R,” she said.
“H. Y. T. H. M.”
Nobody breathed.
“That is correct,” said Mrs. Brower. “Josie Meyer is the Calder Elementary champion.”
The sound that came up out of those folding chairs was not applause. It was bigger than that and more ragged. I have heard that gym roar for basketball. This was another thing.
Tom had his hard hat in both hands and his face turned into the sleeve of his orange bibs. Marcy was on her feet.
I could not stand. I sat with my hands in my lap and watched my granddaughter standing very straight at a microphone, with her eyes wide open and her thumb finally still, and I heard, as clear as the day it happened, a man in a corner booth at Dottie’s saying a hard thing in fifteen seconds and then eating his pie with his ears red.
I said, “Look at that, Walt,” to nobody.
What came after
Josie came down off the stage into her mother’s arms, then her father’s, and for a few minutes it was impossible to see her at all for the people. Bud shook her hand like she was running for office. Roy cried openly and said he had feed dust in his eye.
Orville Tate waited at the back wall until the crowd thinned. Then he came down the side aisle, one slow step after another, until he stood in front of her.
“My m-m-mother,” he said at last, “used to m-make me sit in the c-cloakroom when the inspector came.”
Josie looked up at him.
“Nobody ever c-clapped,” said Orville.
She put her small hand in his enormous one.
“Thank you for tapping,” she said.
She said it all the way through, without a single stop.
The rest I learned in pieces over the next days.
When I went to find my coat, Miss Lanier was standing near the stage in the emptying room.
“Mrs. Haskell, I’m so sorry. I’m going to tell the class tomorrow exactly what I did and why it was wrong. I don’t want to leave any of it out. And I’m going to ask Mrs. Dunn to teach me how to wait.” Her voice wavered. “I never knew I didn’t know.”
“Most of us don’t,” I said. “Not until somebody shows us.”
She did tell them. Three mothers called me on Friday night to say their children had come home and said, “Miss Lanier cried in front of the whole class and then she said it was her fault.”
It cost her something, and it was meant to. She wrote a letter to every family in Room 14 and put her name at the bottom without a single excuse in it, and on Monday she brought Josie a handwritten card, a plain one without any sun, that said only:
I should have asked. Thank you for showing me how. K. Lanier.
Mr. Wendt came to my kitchen on Saturday, hat in his hand. He said he had read Ruth’s note on the gym door at a quarter to seven, and he’d had a few seconds to decide what kind of principal he was going to be.
“And Piper decided it for me. She was already at the microphone.” He rubbed his jaw. “I’d have said no, Fern. If Kayla had asked me first, I’d have said no in a second.”
“I think she knows that now.”
On Monday he rewrote the bee rules and put a copy in every teacher’s box. The new paragraph is one sentence long:
The winner of each room attends the finals. Only the winner may decline.
Miss Lanier does not pick the roster anymore. Neither does anyone else. The children do, by spelling.
I did not want her punished, and I did not want anyone’s name in the Courier. I wanted a ten-year-old girl to be asked a question, and then I wanted the answer to be hers.