The Mum Sale the Principal Shut Down

The old man at the cafe

The next right thing arrived that Wednesday afternoon in the form of a seventy-seven-year-old man in a feed cap, who walked into the Corner Cafe at two o’clock, ordered a slice of pecan pie, and said to nobody in particular, “I hear there’s trouble at the school.”

Elam taught ag and shop at the high school for thirty-eight years. He taught Colt to weld a clean bead, and he taught Doyle, a skinny kid in third-period shop in 1989 who carried a note from his mother about every rule. He has served on the school board eighteen years and is a deacon at our church, and he says “Amen” like he is checking the load on a trailer.

Shanna told him everything, across the pie, in the afternoon lull: the letter, the vendor, the thirty dollars and the seventy-five. When she got to Ronnie’s shop, Elam’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

“That boy,” he said. “That boy always did color inside the lines.”

“Shanna,” he said, looking out the window at the highway, “do you know what a board member can do that a principal can’t?”

He came to my house that evening and took a folded sheet out of his coat, a photocopy of a photocopy, soft at the creases: a district policy on community use of facilities, 1998. He had carried it in his billfold for twenty-eight years, he said, because he had helped write it.

“Any member of the board,” he said, “can reserve a district parking lot or field or gymnasium for a community purpose, on a weekend, outside of school hours, by signing that sheet and filing a copy with the superintendent. It’s not up to the principal. It never was. A principal runs a school, Birdie. He doesn’t run a Saturday.”

I stared at the page.

“He has the vendor contract,” I said. “It says exclusive.”

“On school business, during school hours,” Elam said. “This is a church youth group raising money for a sick girl on a Saturday. Doyle signed that contract himself in August without bringing it to the board. I don’t believe he read the part about community use. I can sign this sheet tonight, and your sale is as legal as Sunday church.”

“I’ll tell you why I haven’t done it before now,” Elam went on. “It’s a fight, and there’s a child in the middle of it. So I’m not asking whether we can. I’m asking whether you can do it right.”

“What does that mean?”

“I want to know whether you can stand on that lot on Saturday and not be mean.”

I thought about the post in the folder. I thought about the creek bridge. I thought about a fifteen-year-old with braces.

“We’ve been praying for him all week,” I said. “The kids. Every morning, by name.”

Elam sat back in his chair. A long, slow smile spread across his face, the first one I had seen on him in a month.

“Well, now,” he said. “That’ll do it.”

He signed the sheet at my kitchen table with the pen from my junk drawer, in the square handwriting he used on shop-class report cards, and filed it with the superintendent’s office first thing in the morning, where a woman named Linda read it twice and said, “Well, I’ll be.”

It was Thursday, and the sale was Saturday week. We had nine days to build four hundred and sixty mums.