Part 2
"S," said Wendell Pugh.
Then he stopped.
The room waited. Reverend Tolman waited, with his finger on the page. Eighty people in their coats and shawls leaned forward a little on the benches. It was the easiest word of the night. Wendell Pugh had spelled "chrysanthemum" not ten minutes before without blinking.
Wendell took a breath.
"Reverend," he said, and his voice came out hoarse, "I'd like to spell a different word. If it's allowed."
Reverend Tolman lowered the book.
"It isn't, Mr. Pugh," he said slowly. "Not by the rules. If you spell another word, you'll be counted as missing 'separate,' and Miss Crowe will win."
"I know it," said Wendell. "I'd like to anyway."
Somebody at the back laughed, and then stopped.
Reverend Tolman looked at Wendell's face for a moment. He was an old man, and he had married a great many couples in Marion County. Something came into his eyes, and he closed the book on his finger.
"Go ahead, Mr. Pugh," he said quietly.
Wendell turned and faced Miss Amity Crowe across the schoolroom.
His ears were scarlet. His hands were shaking. He could not have spoken a sentence to save his life. But a word was different. A word was only letters, one at a time, and he had been spelling words since he was six years old.
"W," he said. "I. L. L."
"Y. O. U."
Somebody's breath caught. Mrs. Haskell put her hand flat on her husband's arm.
Miss Crowe's hands came unfolded. She stood very straight against the wall on the right side of the room, with the frost white on the window behind her, and her lips parted.
"M," said Wendell. "A. R. R. Y."
He swallowed.
"M. E."
And then, because he was Wendell Pugh, and could not leave a thing unfinished, he added, very quietly, "Question mark."
The stove ticked. Outside, one of the horses stamped and blew in the cold.
Miss Amity Crowe put her hand to her mouth.
She stood like that for what seemed to Wendell an hour, while the whole township watched her. He could see her gray eyes shining in the lamplight. He thought she was going to cry, and he thought it was his fault, and he wished the floor of the schoolhouse would open up and swallow him and his good black coat together.
Then she took her hand away from her mouth.
She was not crying. She was smiling. It was not the little sorry smile she had given him at the end of three spelling schools. It was something he had never seen on her face before.
She looked at Reverend Tolman.
"Reverend," she said, in her clear schoolroom voice that could quiet forty children with a word. "Since Mr. Pugh has missed his word, I believe it's my turn."
Reverend Tolman cleared his throat. It took him two tries.
"It is, Miss Crowe."
"Then I'd like to spell a different word too," said Amity Crowe. "If it's allowed."
"It isn't," said Reverend Tolman. His eyes were wet. "Go ahead."
She looked straight across the room at Wendell Pugh.
"Y," she said. "E. S."
And then, because she was a schoolteacher and could not leave a thing unfinished either, she added, "Period."
Old Tom Haskell, the township wag, was the first one on his feet. He let out a whoop that rattled the frosted windows. Then everyone was up, eighty people at once, cheering and laughing and stamping on the plank floor until the stovepipe shook, and somebody threw a hat in the air, and the children were jumping up and down on the benches.
Wendell did not hear any of it.
He walked across the schoolroom, through the crowd, which parted in front of him, to the right side of the room. He stopped in front of Miss Crowe. And then he took his hand out of his coat pocket, and opened it.
In his palm lay a thin, worn gold ring. His mother's. She had pressed it into his hand that morning at breakfast, without a word, and gone back to her porridge.
Amity looked at it. Then up at him.
"Six years," she said softly, so that only he could hear. "Six years, Wendell Pugh, I've been waiting for you to say one word to me that wasn't about a buggy wheel."
"I couldn't," said Wendell. "I tried."
"I know you did. I watched you try." She held out her left hand. "You might have spelled it sooner."
He put the ring on her finger. It had fit his mother for sixty years, and it fit Amity Crowe as if it had been waiting for her all along. Neither of them could stop smiling.
Reverend Tolman married them in the Elm Creek schoolhouse on the first Saturday in March, when the roads had dried enough for the wagons. The whole township came. Wendell's mother sat in the front row in her best black silk, and told everyone who would listen that it was her idea. Nobody argued with her about that, either.
The spelling school went on every January, as it always had.
But after that year, there was a new rule at Elm Creek, which Reverend Tolman wrote in the front of the speller in his own hand, and which nobody ever argued with.
Mr. and Mrs. Pugh may not spell against each other. They are on the same team.