The Canoe in Room Six

The Bare Floor

The room smelled like floor wax.

That was how I knew before I saw anything. For thirty-eight years Room 6 at Haydon Elementary had smelled like pencil shavings, oranges, wet mittens and cedar chips from the hamster cage, and on the afternoon of August eleventh I pushed the door open with my shoulder, two flat moving boxes under my arm, and it smelled like a hospital hallway.

I stood in the doorway a long time.

The floor was a sheet of clean gray shine. The walls were bare white where my bulletin boards had been, with pale squares here and there where the paint had never seen the sun.

The corner by the east windows, where the reading canoe had sat since 1997, was a rectangle of carpet two shades brighter than the rest of the room.

I set my boxes down very gently, as if the room were asleep.

My name is Corinne Alvord. I am sixty-two years old, and I taught third grade in Haydon, Minnesota, for thirty-eight years. I retired on the twenty-ninth of May with a sheet cake in the gym and a card signed by every child in the building.

I came back in August and not June because my husband, Everett, had his right knee replaced on the twenty-fourth of June. He is sixty-four, retired from the grain elevator, and a worse patient than any eight-year-old I ever had. I spent July holding a bag of frozen peas to that knee.

The old principal, Mr. Voigt, who retired the same week I did, had told me not to worry about the room. “Leave it all just as it is, Corinne,” he said in the hallway on the last day. “Come pick through it in August when it’s quiet. Nobody will touch a thing.”

He meant it. He just did not know what was coming behind him.

I put my hand flat on the brighter rectangle of carpet. It still had the dents of the canoe in it, four little round dents where the skids had sat for twenty-eight years.

On the corkboard by the door, one pushpin was left in the cork. Hanging from it by a corner was a yellow index card.

In pencil, in the big careful printing of a child who pressed too hard, it said: mrs alvord is the best teacher in the hole world.

I do not know which child wrote it. It was the only thing in the room that anyone had missed.

Behind the Kitchen Door

Arvid Lund found me standing there.

Arvid had been the custodian at Haydon Elementary for twenty-two years. He is a big, slow, kind man with a gray mustache, and he had waxed that floor himself. When he saw me he stopped in the doorway with his mop bucket and did not come in.

“Corinne,” he said.

“Arvid. Where’s my canoe?”

He looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, then at the bucket. I had known him two decades and I had never seen him look anywhere but at the person he was talking to.

“It went out in July,” he said. “The fifteenth. They brought the big forty-yard dumpster, and I was told to fill it.”

“Told by who?”

“The new principal. Miss Hoyt.” He swallowed. “The fire marshal came through the second week of July and wrote up three rooms. Yours, Mr. Dreyer’s, and the library storeroom. Too much paper. She said anything left behind by retired staff was district property, and it all went.”

“Everything.”

“The cabinet. The boxes. The canoe, I did that myself, me and the Lindgren boy from shop class.” His voice cracked. “I told her you were coming in August. Twice. She said she’d sent a notice.”

“I never got a notice.”

“It went to your school email,” Arvid said quietly. “Which they shut off June first.”

That was true. I had cleaned out that account myself the week I retired.

“The letters?” I said.

He did not answer, and that was the answer.

I walked out the back door past the kitchen, to the loading apron where the dumpster had stood. The pavement had a faint rectangle of cleaner gray on it. Somebody had hosed it.

I stood on that clean place for a good five minutes. I did not cry. I would like to say that was strength. It was not. Something in me had gone flat and quiet, the way a field goes after hail.