I eased it out anyway, gentle as an egg. Turned it over once in my hands. Then I closed the little door back, walked to her kitchen chair, and had to sit down before my knees did it for me, because it was a telegram, folded to the size of a matchbook, with a man’s ring inside the fold.
Western Union. Yellow gone the color of tea. Sent the fourth of September, 1952, from Sylacauga, and time-stamped at the bottom four sixteen in the afternoon.
Eleanor would have read it at seventeen minutes after four.
ELEANOR THEY CAME TO THE HOUSE THIS MORNING ABOUT ROY. MAMA CANNOT WRITE IT DOWN. HE HAD YOUR PICTURE ON HIM THEY SAID. I AM SORRY TO SEND THIS BY WIRE. COME IF YOU CAN. VIRGIE
The ring is a plain gold band, man’s size, and the inside of it says R to E and a date in June of 1952. Three months.
She was twenty-two years old.
She started teaching fourth grade at Cleveland Street in the fall of 1953 and taught it thirty-five years and never married anybody. She bought that clock secondhand sometime in the sixties, took the bird out, and built her own minute into the works where nobody could reset it.
That clock keeps the right time. She was not making a joke. She had told my husband the plain truth and let him think it was schoolteacher humor.
Here is the part I have not been able to put down.
Nobody came to her funeral. There were nine of us and six were neighbors.
So I put a notice in the paper and I called the school and I asked one question, which was whether anybody remembered having Miss Eleanor Prather in the fourth grade.
We held it in the gym at Cleveland Street on the nineteenth of April.
Two hundred and sixty people came. Men in their seventies. A woman who flew in from Reno. Three of them are teachers because of her, and one man stood up and said she kept him after school every day for a year in 1971 and it was the only place he was safe.
She had a family. It was four hundred people wide and every one of them was told at nine years old to sit up and try again, and none of them knew she had a funeral because she had no next of kin to put it in the paper.
The clock hangs in the library at Cleveland Street now. It does not run and it is never going to, and there is a card beside it that says it keeps the right time and does not explain any further.
The telegram and the ring are in my house. I am not putting those in a display case for children to look at.
My husband said she did not want it found while she was alive to answer for it. He was right and I think about that. But she did not throw it away either, and she hung it in a hallway she walked twenty times a day, and I have decided that means she wanted somebody to know eventually. Just not while she had to talk about it.