THAT YEAR I STARTED working for the school newspaper, The
Maroon Wave. I wanted to join some club or group or organization
where I could feel I belonged, where people wouldn't move away if I sat
down next to them. I was a good runner, and I thought of going out for
the track team, but you had to pay for your uniform, and Mom said we
couldn't afford it. You didn't have to buy a uniform or a musical
instrument or pay any dues to work on the Wave.
Miss Jeanette Bivens, one of the high school English teachers, was the
Wave's faculty adviser. She was a quiet, precise woman who had been at
Welch High School so long that she had also been Dad's English teacher.
She was the first person in his life, he once told me, who'd showed any
faith in him. She thought he was a talented writer and had encouraged
him to submit a twenty-four-line poem called. "Summer Storm" to a
statewide poetry competition. When it won first prize, one of Dad's other
teachers wondered aloud if the son of two lowlife alcoholics like Ted and
Erma Walls could have written it himself. Dad was so insulted that he
walked out of school. It was Miss Bivens who convinced him to return
and earn his diploma, telling him he had what it took to be somebody.
Dad had named me after her; Mom suggested adding the second N to
make it more elegant and French.
Miss Bivens told me that as far as she could remember, I was the only
seventh-grader who'd ever worked for the Wave. I started out as a
proofreader. On winter evenings, instead of huddling around the stove at
93 Little Hobart Street, I'd go down to the warm, dry offices of The
Welch Daily News, where The Maroon Wave was typeset, laid out, and
printed. I loved the newsroom's purposeful atmosphere. Teletype
machines clattered against the wall as spools of paper carrying news
from around the world piled up on the floor. Banks of fluorescent lights
hung down eighteen inches above the slanted, glass-topped desks where
men wearing green eyeshades conferred over stacks of copy and