Waverly Linwood lived eleven miles from my house.
She had lived there the entire time. Eleven miles, in a yellow clapboard house with a porch, in the same town where Wynne had taken her first steps, and learned to swim, and lost her first tooth. She had shopped at the same grocery store. I may very well have stood behind her at the register.
I should say why he is a principal, since I have since asked.
He did not plan to be. For the first two years after that night he went on teaching fifth grade and attending drills, and did not tell anybody what had happened in the ditch, because he was not sure it had happened to him. Then, in the spring of the third year, the district asked whether he would consider the assistant principal’s job, and he went home and thought about it for eleven days.
“The thing is,” he told me, “I found that I couldn’t stop checking on children.”
Not in a worrying way. He just found, once he’d carried a baby out of a drainage ditch, that he had a different relationship to every child in a hallway. He noticed which ones were not eating. Which ones were in the same sweater four days running. Which ones sat alone.
