第18章 The Graduation

The gym doors were propped open from seven because the school had only ever held a graduation in there, and by nine there were folding chairs in rows back to the stage with the east-bank families along one wall and the west-bank families along the other, and the aisle down the middle was empty and waiting. Wren came in the side door and stopped in the corridor at the trophy case, because from that window you could see the yard, and past the yard the wall, and past the wall the flat run of the river, and on the bend below it the bridge with its new oak and the lamp under the deck that somebody had trimmed the wick on. Nobody had told her to look. She looked for a while anyway. "West bank along the west wall," Mrs. Keel said behind her. "East bank along the east. No — not like that. The two of you together." The gym went quiet the way a room does when thirty years of habit give way at once. Wren walked to the west side and stood fourth from the front, and Miles was third from the front on the other side of the aisle, and for a second they were both looking at the floor the way schoolchildren do, and then he looked up and she looked up and neither of them moved. "You will read your piece when I call you," Mrs. Keel said. "And you will read it to the room. Not to the river." "It is in my pocket." "Then do not lose your pocket." The band played something and got it wrong, and the principal let them get it wrong, and then she walked to the front and did not take the folder she had been carrying for nineteen years. "I have been a teacher in this building for thirty-one years," she said, "and for twenty-nine of those I have written a speech that began with the word tradition. Tradition is a good word. It is a word you can put in a sentence and never have to look at it again. I wrote a great many of them." Somebody at the back laughed and then stopped, because she was not smiling. "In April two young people found a bridge at the bend below Cold Spring that no map in this county has ever had on it, and they kept it, and they told us about it, and this town woke up. I have taught children on both banks for three decades and I have never once been able to put into a folder what actually happened to us that spring, and the reason is that what happened did not fit in a folder." She put her hands flat on the desk. "The bridge is at the bend. It is eleven feet of new oak with a lamp under it that has been there fifty years and is not ours to light. A house used to stand at that bend. It went in the water in the year of the big flood, and the council put a map on the table with no bridge on it, and we all agreed with the map for fifty years. I taught the map to children, year after year, in this room, and I believed it, and it was the least true thing in my desk drawer." Miles had not moved. Wren could see the back of his head and one shoulder and the place where his collar had started to come away at the neck, which it always did by June. "The bridge is on the map now," the principal said. "It went on the map the night your fathers stood in the middle of it and said a name out loud, and every one of you in this room is standing in a school that is only one year older than that map entry. Do not waste it. Some of you will spend your whole lives being handed a map and believing it. Be the ones who check." She sat down, and the room did not move for a good two seconds, and then Miles began to clap, alone, and the whole east bank and the whole west bank caught it up with him. Wren read her piece at eleven forty. She took it out of her pocket, unfolded it along the creases it had acquired in four months in a coat pocket, and she stood at the front with the paper shaking slightly and the whole town in front of her and the bridge not visible from where she stood. She had written it in November, at two in the morning, on the planks, with gloves off, in the particular handwriting of somebody who has been cold for two hours. "My poem is about a bridge," she said, "and it is a bad poem, and I am going to read it anyway." They laughed, which she had not planned for and which she used. "It is about a girl on one bank and a boy on the other, who cannot say a single thing to each other for about four hundred lines, and who are both, in the meantime, extremely good at planks." Miles put his hand over his face. "They write to each other," Wren said. "Once a week. In a bottle. And neither of them ever writes the sentence, and the sentence is always the same sentence, and I want you to know that I have never been in love and this is the closest I have come." Somebody in the east-bank row shouted "GO ON", and she went on. "It is a bad poem because it is a bridge and a bridge is not a poem, it is a thing that carries weight, and I wanted the boy to know the weight. So I am going to read the last line and then I am going to tell you what it actually means, because nobody ever does that." She looked at the floor for a second, and then at him. "It is not a love poem," Wren said. "It is a load test. I have been asking him every week for four months whether he will hold, and he has answered every week without once writing the word, and the answer is yes. That is the whole poem. He holds." Miles took his hand away from his face and did not put it back, and about a dozen people turned and looked at him instead of at her, and he sat very still under it. She read the poem. It was a bad poem. It was four hundred lines of a girl who could not say one thing and a boy who would not say it first, and a river, and a lamp, and a town that had agreed for fifty years not to look at one thing, and when she got to the end Miles put both hands flat on his knees. Afterward, out in the yard with the sun off the wall and everybody standing about not going home, Miles found her by the flagpole and did not say anything for long enough that she thought he had come over to tell her the poem had been too long. "The girl," he said, "in the poem." "The girl is not real." "The girl counts the planks." He was looking at the wall and not at her. "Every letter. She counts them, and she never once says the number, but it is always eleven, and it was eleven before we took the two dark ones up." Wren did not say anything. "I have been sitting on the bus for two years with a boy who counts planks," Miles said, "and I never once asked him why, and I am asking you now so that you can tell me, and then I can write to him, and then it will be the last letter either of us has to write about a bridge." The bell went for the fourth time and the yard began to empty. "You are graduating," Wren said. "You are not emigrating." "My father has the mill house and the plan is on the kitchen table," Miles said, "and my grandfather kept one in a chest for fifty years, and I have decided I am not going to be the third man in this family to be the only one in the room who knows what is in it. So I am going to ask him tonight, and I think I already know what he is going to say, and I think that is what terrifies me." "What is it?" "He is going to say it was never his to keep," Miles said. "He is going to say it was ours, and that we are not to let him have it back. And then I am going to have to take a bus to the city on the September one, because Wren in the city is going to be two hours away on a Saturday and that is the whole of my problem and I have had it since April." The yard was nearly empty. Down at the bend, out past the wall, somebody had started the lamp under the deck, and from here you could not see the lamp but you could see the water change colour where the light came off it. "You are not to let him have it back," Wren said, carefully. "No," Miles said. "I am not."