The Canoe in Room Six

Open House Night

The school parking lot was full when we turned onto Elm Street that Friday at twenty past six. Pickups, mostly, and farm trucks, a few minivans and a sheriff’s cruiser, and cars were parked down both sides of Elm for two blocks.

“Ev,” I said. “Who are all these people?”

“I think,” my husband said, “that they’re yours.”

He parked. He got out with his cane, came around, and took my arm. We went up the front walk together, and the people on the walk went quiet when they saw me. Then, one at a time, they moved aside.

The hall was lined with them. Both sides, wall to wall, grown men and women standing along the lockers in their church clothes with their hands full.

I saw faces I had last seen at nine years old. A boy I taught in 1987, bald as an egg and a grandfather now. A woman from 2003, in scrubs, straight from a shift. A man in a deputy’s uniform with his hat under his arm.

Nobody spoke. They looked at me, and one at a time, down that long hall, they began to smile.

There were two hundred and six of them in the building that night, I learned later, and more in the lot.

Once, at the end, for Travis Kuehn.

He stood at the door of Room 6 in a clean white shirt. His hands were scrubbed as clean as they would go, and he held them in front of him like a little boy.

“Mrs. Alvord,” he said. “Before you go in.”

And this is where I have to tell you about the principal.

She was standing by the drinking fountain with her back against the wall. She had a gray banker box in her arms, with a lid, and on the end of it, in black marker, in my own handwriting, were the words Letters 1987 to 1994.

“Mrs. Alvord,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “I have something that belongs to you. I need to tell you where I got it, and I need to tell you in front of them. If you’ll let me.”

What the Principal Said

I will give you what she said as nearly as I can.

“The night before they brought the dumpster,” Kristen Hoyt said, “July fourteenth, I stayed late. I told myself I was checking the room. I was making sure it was done. I wanted the hall clear and the fire marshal’s list closed and my first month over.”

She looked at the box.

“Your boxes were stacked against the back wall of the closet, and the first one was open on top. A letter was sticking up, in a child’s pencil. It said, Dear Mrs. Alvord, thank you for the mittens. I don’t know how you knew.”

Somebody in the hall made a sound.

“I read it standing up. I read the next one. I stood there forty minutes. Then I picked up that one box and put it in my trunk and told myself I’d sort it out in the morning. In the morning the truck came, and I let them take the rest.”

She was crying now. Not prettily. Hard, with her mouth open, like a child.

“I’ve carried this around in my garage for two months. I drove to your house four times and sat in the car. I wrote you a letter and tore it up eleven times. I couldn’t give it back, because to give it back I’d have to tell you I knew, that night, exactly what I was throwing away.”

“Miss Hoyt,” I said.

“Let me finish. Please.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. “My mother kept everything. Newspapers. Mail. Coupons. When I was nine, the path to my bedroom was eleven inches wide, and when the furnace quit one winter I carried my little brother to the neighbor’s through the dark along that path, with a flashlight in my teeth. I swore that if I lived I would never keep a thing I didn’t need. I’ve kept that vow twenty-seven years.”