Short Stories of Richard C. Hayner

The Lesson

A short story by Richard C. Hayner

It was the fifth grade, and I lived in a small town, so small that the entire school, from first grade to twelfth, was in one building. In fact, the entire fifth grade class was comprised of five kids.

Now, on this particular day, I don’t recall if it was a cold, winter torn day or a sweat dripping, cracked earth baker, you imagine it how you like, the fifth grade teacher left early. That meant we got to go into the fourth grade class for the rest of the day. I mean it’s not like it was crowded with two grade levels in one room. But the fourth grade had Mrs. Estes, and she was mean. That meant a lot for me to say; everyone was mean to me, including my teacher, my classmates, all four of them, and the janitor as well. So, if I said she was mean, there had to be a streak a mile long for me to point her out. What was worse was she especially didn’t like me. There was no reason for it that I had supplied. It came as a package deal if you were new in town and the preacher’s kid on top of that.

Old Mrs. Estes had been lecturing her class on those dang lean participles they always griped about and didn’t know what to do with us, so we were assigned a poster to draw. Being a natural born artist, that was good news to me. I could lose myself in my art and forget that battleaxe existed for the better part of the afternoon.

Well, come time to be finished with our masterpieces, I don’t remember what we were supposed to draw either, so you can just picture in your own head what you may, the old bag told us to lean them against the wall. I heard her say we should put them to the right of the pencil sharpener, and that’s right where I put mine. But the others put theirs to the left of the pencil sharpener, all giggling and pointing at mine as they sauntered back to their seats and I stood there, half way between my poster and my chair in an awful state of indecision. Finally, the scoffing got the better of me, and I returned to the wall and set my poster on top of the stack to the left of the pencil sharpener and took my seat.

Old Mrs. Estes, and I’ll swear to you to this day as to how sure I am that she didn’t have anything but malice toward me when she did it, no, she wasn’t trying to teach me a valuable lesson, heck, she didn’t know there was a lesson to be learnt, barked at me so sharp it made me jump back out of the seat I was just settling my rear quarters into, “RICHARD!”

It wasn’t because my book had gone to the floor with a crash and the brown “Mrs. Baird’s Bread is sure fine” book cover slopped off to the side like the book’s pants had dropped to its knees and the desk boomed like a big bass drum that they all turned to the back of the room to cover their mouths as if they wanted to hide the cackles and guffaws.

Then she stood up. “Where did I tell you to put your poster?” Her hands had gone to either side, twisted around so the knuckles dug into her hips and the fingers just dangled out in the air like they were about to catch some innocent moth passing by.

“Against the wall to the right of the pencil sharpener,” I spoke. The chuckles became a roar.

She said each word as if it were a separate sentence, “Then why did you move your poster?”

I barely managed to reply, “’Cause that’s where everyone else put theirs.”

Her lips got so tight they could have popped her dentures out. “Well, you just march up there and move all of the posters where I said to put them in the first place!”

That woman had told us to draw posters because she didn’t have a lesson planned out for the fifth grade, but she taught me a lesson that would last a lifetime. Since then, I’ve always gone with what I thought was right, no matter what the crowd might say, and I’ll have you know that I’ve found that, when my own ideas conflict with what everyone else thinks, more times than not, I can be found to the right of the pencil sharpener.