The Canoe in Room Six

What They Wrote on the Hull

There is one more thing, and it is the one the principal could not undo.

Late that night, when the families had gone and the sleeping children had been carried out to the minivans, a few of us were left in Room 6 with the lamps on. Everett sat by the door with his knee up on a wastebasket. Travis and Travis and Jolene sat on the floor, eating the last of the church ladies’ bars.

It was Travis who pulled out the paint pens.

“Mrs. Alvord, would you mind if we signed the hull?”

I did not understand.

“Inside,” he said. “On the bottom, under the cushion. Everyone who ever sat in your room. Just names and the year. You can’t hardly see it from outside. But it’ll be there.”

Travis lifted the cushion. The inside of the Boat was bare white fiberglass, smooth and clean as a bowl.

I think Jolene signed first. Then Travis, in his big, careful, blocky hand, Travis K., 1993, and I could see his lips move as he wrote, the way a boy’s lips will. Then Travis. Then they went out to the hall and began bringing in the rest. They came all night by ones and twos, and again on Saturday, and on Sunday after church.

By Monday there were eight hundred and fourteen signatures, and the inside of the Boat was a solid mass of names, 1987 to the present, in every color of paint pen, up the sides and over the bow and across the bottom. The deputy signed his three times, once for himself and once for each of his two brothers, who were away.

No principal on earth can take that Boat out of Room 6, because she could not remove eight hundred names without removing the people who signed them. And in Haydon, Minnesota, those people are the plumber, the deputy, the nurse on the third floor, and half the school board.

Kristen Hoyt was the last to sign.

She had spent the evening in the gym folding chairs, unasked, and she came to the door of Room 6 near midnight and stood there until Abby saw her. She did not speak. She held out her hand for a paint pen, and Abby gave her a blue one.

She knelt and wrote, in the one clear space left near the bow, in small precise print: Kristen Hoyt, her first year. Then, under it, smaller: I am sorry.

“Mrs. Alvord,” she said, without looking up. “I’d like to write a policy. For the district. That anything a retiring teacher leaves, anything, goes into a labeled bin for ninety days, and nothing is discarded until the teacher has been called. By telephone. By a person.”

“That sounds like a good policy.”

“And I would like,” she said, and her voice broke, “to be allowed to read a book in the Boat, some day when Miss Sundby’s class is out. I’m told it’s for being quiet.”

I looked at that young woman on the floor of Room 6 with blue paint on her thumb.

I did not forgive her, and I want to be careful about that, because a person can say too easily that she has. What I said was true.

“The Boat is for finishing your work,” I said. “And for being quiet. I think you’ve done both.”