11/22/63: A Novel

The subject I’d assigned was “The Day That Changed My Life.” Most of the responses were heartfelt but awful: sentimental tales of a kindly aunt who’d taken in a pregnant teenager, an Army buddy who had demonstrated the true meaning of bravery, a chance meeting with a celebrity (Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, I think it was, but maybe it was Karl Malden). The teachers among you who have picked up an extra three or four thousand a year by taking on a class of adults studying for their General Equivalency Diploma will know what a dispiriting job reading such themes can be. The grading process hardly figures into it, or at least it didn’t for me; I passed everybody, because I never had an adult student who did less than try his or her ass off. If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.

What made the job hard was that the red pen became my primary teaching tool instead of my mouth, and I practically wore it out. What made the job dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen teaching was apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty without knowing how to spell (totally, not todilly), or capitalize in the proper places (White House, not white-house), or write a sentence containing both a noun and a verb, you’re probably never going to know. Yet we soldier on, gamely circling the misused word in sentences like My husband was to quick to judge me or crossing out swum and replacing it with swam in the sentence I swum out to the float often after that.

It was such hopeless, trudging work I was doing that night, while not far away another high school basketball game wound down toward another final buzzer, world without end, amen. It was not long after Christy got out of rehab, and I suppose if I was thinking anything, it was to hope that I’d come home and find her sober (which I did; she’s held onto her sobriety better than she held onto her husband). I remember I had a little headache and was rubbing my temples the way you do when you’re trying to keep a little nagger from turning into a big thumper. I remember thinking, Three more of these, just three, and I can get out of here. I can go home, fix myself a big cup of instant cocoa, and dive into the new John Irving novel without these sincere but poorly made things hanging over my head.

There were no violins or warning bells when I pulled the janitor’s theme off the top of the stack and set it before me, no sense that my little life was about to change. But we never know, do we? Life turns on a dime.

He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and he must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if I’d closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille. There was a little squiggle, like a flourish, at the end of every lower-case y. I remember that with particular clarity.

I remember how his theme started, too. I remember it word for word.

It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my father murdirt my mother and two brothers and hurt me bad. He hurt my sister too, so bad she went into a comah. In three years she died without waking up. Her name was Ellen and I loved her very much. She love to pick flouers and put them in vayses.