Free Wonderful Room by Bryan Woolley Page A

sophomore year at Fort Davis High School, I fell into a quarrel with my algebra teacher. She was handing back homework papers she had graded. She didn‧t give me one. I asked why.
    “You didn‧t turn it in,” she said.
    “Yes I did.”
    “No you didn‧t.”
    “Yes I did.”
    “Are you calling me a liar?” she asked.
    “If you‧re saying I didn‧t turn in my homework, you‧re a liar,” I said.
    The teacher grabbed my wrist and led me to the office of George Roy Moore, the school superintendent. As we entered, she burst into loud sobs.
    “What on earth…?” Mr. Moore asked.
    The teacher — a young woman not long out of college -- blubbered incoherently. One sentence, however, rang through like a gong: “He called me a liar.”
    Mr. Moore asked no questions. He told the teacher to return to her classroom. She departed, snuffing.
    To me, Mr. Moore said, “Shut the door.” Then he said, “Empty your back pockets and bend over the desk.”
    I remember the contents. My right rear jeans pocket held my wallet and a white handkerchief, used. The left held a black pocket comb and a folded copy of
Glory to Goldy,
the school play wewere practicing. I situated myself as Mr. Moore had instructed. He took of his belt, doubled it, and whacked my backside with it exactly 20 times. “All right,” he said. When I turned around, Mr. Moore was putting on his belt. Now tears glistened in his eyes, too.
    His family and mine had been friends for generations. We were not-too-distant kin. Mr. Moore had gone to school with my mother. My grandmother had been his sixth-grade teacher. Now she was a member of the faculty he led.
    I didn‧t mind the whipping much. Tough I had turned in the algebra homework, I had been wrong to call the teacher a liar in front of her class. Whippings were a common punishment for schoolboys in those days. Among a boy‧s buddies, a whipping was even a badge of honor, evidence of badass toughness.
    But Mr. Moore‧s tears made me ashamed. I knew they were for my mother and my grandmother, not for me.
    “There‧s no point in your going back to class,” he said. “Sit down. Let‧s talk.”
    I eased my tingling backside into the hard wooden chair beside his desk. Mr. Moore was a quiet man with calm blue eyes and prematurely gray hair, respected by everyone. He rested his elbows on the edge of the desk and laced his fingers together in here‧s-the-church-and-here‧s-the-steeple fashion. The blue eyes gazed at me for a long time. I remember the slow tick of the pendulum clock on the officewall. Finally, he said, “You‧re a smart boy, Bryan.”
    I silently agreed. In those days, I believed myself a lot smarter than I was, a self-delusion that experience eventually would correct.
    “What are you going to do with your life?”
    “Sir?”
    “After you finish school. What are you going to do with your life? Have you thought about it?”
    I hadn‧t. Not for an instant, unless you count my childhood yearning to be a cowboy like my Great Uncle Bryan. “No, sir.”
    “Why don‧t you be a writer?” Mr. Moore said. “I have a friend who became a writer for
Newsweek.
I‧ve always envied him. You have the talent.”
    He talked for the rest of the period.
    After the passage of 55 years, I still consider that conversation one of the three or four most important in my life. I wonder where I would be now and what I would be doing if that algebra teacher hadn‧t lost my homework and dragged me to Mr. Moore‧s office.
    I took his advice seriously. Themes and essays had always been favorite parts of my English and history classes. Now I wrote them as I thought Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain might have done. I won an honorable mention medal in an essay contest sponsored by
The El Paso Herald-Post
about soil conservation, a subject about which I knew nothing. I entered the essay competition in the district University Interscholastic League meet. I won third place. (In my junior and senior years, Iwould