The Canoe in Room Six

The Boat

There was a canoe in it.

I will say that again, because I could not at first believe it. It sat on four wooden skids on the east side of the room, where the brighter carpet was. Half of a sixteen-foot fiberglass canoe, with a yellow duck-cloth cushion in the bottom and a brass clip lamp with a green shade on the side.

It was not the canoe I had lost. I could tell at once. The hull was too smooth, and the cushion had been sewn by somebody who could not sew.

“It’s the other half,” Travis Nygaard said quietly at my elbow.

He was a tall, sunburned man in a pressed shirt, with the stubborn Nygaard jaw. He had his cap in both hands.

“When you and Mr. Alvord cut Grandpa’s canoe in 1997, you kept the bow. The stern stayed in Grandpa’s barn. It’s hung from the rafters twenty-eight years. Dad said burn it. Grandpa said no, Mrs. Alvord might want it someday.” He shook his head. “I got it down Monday. Travis rebuilt the end. Jolene’s mother sewed the cushion. She isn’t a seamstress. I’ll just say that.”

“Who built the skids?”

“Your husband.”

I turned around. Everett stood behind me with his cane, and he did not meet my eyes. He looked at the canoe.

“I figured,” he said gruffly, “it ought to have the same legs.”

I took one step, and a small hand slid into mine.

It belonged to a girl of about eight in a plaid dress. She looked up at me solemnly.

“You’re Mrs. Alvord,” she said.

“I am.”

“I’m in Miss Sundby’s room. I’m not allowed in the Boat yet. Miss Sundby says the Boat is for finishing your work and for being quiet.” She took a breath. “But she said you could go first.”

Abby Sundby came up beside her, red-eyed, with her hair coming out of its clip. “Mrs. Alvord, I came in on the first day and the room was bare, and Mr. Lund told me, and I just thought, somebody should tell somebody. And then they were all here.”

“You did right,” I said.

Then I stepped into the Boat.

I am sixty-two years old, with a bad shoulder and a worse back, and I climbed into half a canoe in a blue dress and sat down on a yellow cushion in front of two hundred people. I put my head back against the bow.

Somebody turned on the lamp.

And a boy of seven, from the back of the crowd, with no idea in the world who I was, said in a perfectly clear voice, “She looks happy.”

The Cabinet

The cabinet stood against the back wall, gray and four-doored, with a new coat of paint and a brass handle that did not match. For a moment I thought it was mine. Then I saw the label on the top, in neat nurse’s print: Socks. Mittens. Hats. Granola.

Jolene Pruess stood beside it in her scrubs with a clipboard against her chest.

“It’s hospital surplus,” she said. “We took up a collection on the third floor. And the high school kids sold pheasant sandwiches at the football game. We had to stop at eleven hundred dollars. Miss Hoyt signed off on it herself.”

I opened the first door. It was full of wool socks.

“They’re wool,” Jolene said. “Mostly.”

I stood with my hand on that door and looked at the girl I remembered, the small solemn girl with the missing teeth who ate her lunch in the Boat for three weeks in October of 2002.

“Why did you eat in the Boat?” I said. I don’t know why I asked. It had been twenty-three years.

“My dad had left that month,” Jolene said. “I didn’t want anybody to see my lunch. You never said anything. Not once. You just put a sack of crackers in my cubby every morning and said, ‘Jolene, would you do me a favor and finish these before they go stale?'” She laughed through it. “I became a nurse because of that. One of the reasons.”

I put my arms around her.

Everyone in that room was crying by then, and no one pretended otherwise, and Travis Kuehn took off his cap and held it against his mouth.