Miss Witt sets the timer on the edge of her desk, then turns and begins to erase yesterday’s lessons from the chalkboard. I watch the hem on her flowered dress jiggle up and down as her arm moves up and down, side to side. She has just given us the last three spelling words when suddenly my brain seems frozen.
I’m thinking about nickels and pennies and quarters while all around me I hear the sounds the other are making. All totaled I have $3.95 in my dresser drawer at home, saved from picking up pecans in the fall. My best friend Helen’s pencil lead breaks and she goes to the pencil sharpener mounted on the chalkboard edge to sharpen it.
Miss Witt has promised a nickel to every student who spells every word right. And I sure could use that nickel. So why can’t I spell those last three words? They are all S words. I can hear repeating over and over inside my head. Sting. Swing. And Sink. Just how Miss Witt said them. But how to spell them? I studied hard last night, and I swear I had them firmly in my head.
Billy Bundy, who sits next to me on the right scrunches up a sheet of paper with erasure holes on it; he pokes it through the inkwell at the top of his desk. To my left is an empty desk where the red-headed new boy, J.D., usually sits. He’s not here today. Yesterday he threw up all over the floor so we had a free recess period while Mr. Beasley cleaned it all up.
With that five cents added to my savings I’d be able to buy that toy trumpet from Uncle’s general store. With the pecan season behind us already, it’ll be a whole year before I have a chance to earn more. Of course it isn’t a real trumpet. My harmonica isn’t real either, but I can still play “home sweet home” and “rock of ages” on it. Grandma says I have God-given talent.
I have wanted to play a trumpet ever since I saw that movie about a young man with a horn. A man named Bix was all alone int his big city and always feeling sad until an old black man in a bad part of town gave him a trumpet to play. Then he wasn’t sad anymore. At least not until the black man got hit by a car. But even after the black man died he still had his trumpet and his music. Well, I want to sit on my behind in a dark doorway too and play sad songs and have no farm chores to do.
“Three more minutes,” Miss Witt says. She crosses to the cloak room where our hats and coats hang. Helen says she goes in there to cry sometimes. I glance at my speller next to the blank page on my desk. I can hear Miss Witt blowing her nose in the cloak room. It would take only a moment to open the book, glance at the words, then close it. I push my thumb against the marker and the pages fall open with barely a sound.
Sting, S-T-I-N-G. Swing, S-W-I-N-G. Sink, S-I-N-K. I print quickly. Done! And with time to spare. Everyone folds their paper lengthwise and passes it to the front. Miss Witt has set a coin box full of nickels on her desk. I anticipate the icy coolness of the nickel against my sweaty palm.
Billy Bundy has turned his eyelids inside out and the room is soon awash in giggles. Miss Witt gives Billy the look and glances through the folded papers on her desk, making marks and writing across some of them. Then the takes the box of nickels and our folded papers and hands them back one by one.
As she walks she talks. If we can spell words for a nickel reward, she says, then we must remember that we can do anything with no reward in mind other than knowing we an do whatever we need to do, virtue being it’s own reward.
Virtue, she explained, means good character . . . honesty. Doing the best we can because we should, not because somebody tells us to, or offers us a reward. And even though the words she uses are bigger than my second grade life, something about them make my ears begin a slow burn.
Miss Witt lays my paper on my desk and places a shiny, round nickel on top with George Washington’s face upward. It makes me think of the story about him chopping down the cherry tree. All the blood in my body seems to flow then directly to my ears, sloshing like seaspray inside my head, trapping the words there, never to be forgotten. STING, SWING, and SINK, entwined forever with that other word Miss Witt taught me that day.
H-O-N-E-S-T-Y. And somehow I know that if I buy that trumpt with this nickel, never a sweet note will it sound.
