The Canoe in Room Six

The Office

I did go to see the new principal, but not that day.

I went the next morning in my good gray slacks, after calling ahead like a civilized person. The woman at the front desk, Pam, gave me the look you give somebody at a funeral who is holding up better than she should.

Kristen Hoyt was thirty-six years old. She had come from a school in Sioux Falls with a master’s degree and a firm handshake, and she had been principal of Haydon Elementary for exactly forty-three days.

“Mrs. Alvord,” she said. “Please sit down. I owe you an apology, and I’d like to say it before you say anything.”

I sat.

“The fire marshal gave us thirty days to correct three rooms. Yours had a combustible load he called, in writing, the worst he had seen in an occupied classroom. There were paper stacks to the ceiling in the closet. There was a canoe.”

“I know there was a canoe.”

“I should have called you.” She said it directly, and I will give her that. “I sent a notice to your district address. When it bounced, the dumpster was already scheduled, and I decided the form you signed on June first covered it.”

She slid a copy across the desk. It said that personal items not removed by the thirtieth of June become the property of the district. My own signature was on the line, small and sure, from the day Everett drove me to school with a casserole for the secretaries and I signed everything they put in front of me.

I had signed it. Mr. Voigt had told me not to worry, and I had believed him, because he was Mr. Voigt.

“There was nothing in there of any value,” Kristen Hoyt said. “I want you to know I looked. Paper, mostly.”

“Miss Hoyt,” I said, “is Abby Sundby in the room now?”

“Miss Sundby is a first-year teacher. She’s very enthusiastic. She’s setting up this week.”

“Does she know what was in it?”

“No. I didn’t see any reason to burden her.”

“I’d ask you not to,” I said. “She’s got twenty-two eight-year-olds coming next week. Let her think the room was always that bare.”

“You aren’t going to take this to the board,” she said. Not quite a question.

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

I thought about it honestly, because she had asked honestly.

“Because I’m tired,” I said. “And because whatever was in that dumpster is gone, and the children are still going to sit in that room next week whether I’m right or not.”

I stood and shook her hand. She held on a half second too long, as if she wanted to say a thing she did not know how to say.

At the door I turned around. From where I stood, the photograph on her desk faced me, a small, old, square picture of a girl of about nine, standing in the narrow path between two walls of newspapers.

I did not ask. I thought about it all the way home.