Smoke Rings

The weather was chilly in McMinnville that September morning of 1962. A cold front had drifted south out of Canada. A blue line formed a bowl shape on the weather map. Ray Canfield thought about it, saw it in his mind’s eye just as surely as if he were looking at it on a paper map in front of him. It sagged down past Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, and then moved on toward Georgia.

 A row of ten small dark-feathered birds sat on the wire that held up the red and green stop and go lights across Main Street. With wings held close to their bodies they looked at him and waited for the sun to emerge from a cloud and warm them. As he turned toward them, one flew and lit above a sign over a doorway across the street. He read the sign slowly to himself WARREN COUNTY SCHOOLS, Hobart L. Smith, Superintendent.

He had come to this small city on the Cumberland Plateau in the state of Tennessee in search of a job, a job as a teacher, which some refer to as a position, but in the end it is a job, no matter what one chooses to call it. His last outing of attempting to sell ads for The Murfreesboro Daily Times to people who did not want to buy them had lasted only a week. It was not something he would ever do again. Now, he thought to try his hand at teaching. It wasn’t what he had intended to do upon graduating from college, but here he was looking at a sign about schools.

 He had gotten out of the habit of wearing a tie while he had been in college, but today he had one on, and a dark suit as well.  He held a manila envelope in his right hand.

He looked at his watch, and then at the clock in the tower atop the courthouse a block away. It was five minutes after nine. He waited there a couple more minutes, and then walked across the street toward the door. After clearing his throat and squaring his shoulders, he opened it and walked  into a room with a long counter about five feet inside the door. Behind the counter, there were three women sitting at sturdy desks in the middle of the space. Each desk supported a black ROYAL typewriter. Two of the women were typing, while the third, a bit older than the other two, looked up from some papers she was reading. 

“Good morning sir,” she said. “May I help you?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the young man. “Is Mr. Smith in?”

“I think he is,” she answered. “Do you have an appointment with him?”

“Well, uh, no I don’t. I didn’t know I was coming up here this morning. I just woke up and decided to do it. Someone told me yesterday that there might be an opening for a teacher in this county. I just thought I’d come by and ask.”

“I don’t know if I ought to let you go in there. You’re supposed to have an appointment before you can see him. But, since you are already here just wait a minute and I’ll go see if he wants to talk to you. He’s real busy most mornings. Anyway, I don’t know how stuff like that gets around. I don’t know anything about them needing another teacher. And if I did I wouldn’t broadcast it to the world.”

She pushed her chair away from the desk, stood up, carefully removed her glasses, and laid them on the papers. She stood there a moment and tugged at her skirt in an effort to make it seem a bit longer.

“I’ll go see,” she said again as she disappeared through a doorway at the back of the room.

Ray Canfield waited at the counter, nervously drumming his fingers on the shiny surface. It smelled of polish where someone had wiped it clean before he came in. Occasionally, one of the women typing would glance at him, sizing him up, wondering about him, guessing his age, and whether or not he was married. After a couple of minutes Mrs. Carmichael reappeared in the doorway. “Mr. Smith said you can come on back,” she said.  “Just go through this door and down the hallway to the last office on the left.”

She walked back to her desk and sat down and put her glasses back on, and began shuffling the papers she had been reading.  She put the green ones on the bottom, the yellow ones in the middle, and the pink ones on top.

Ray Canfield went around the counter and through the narrow slit that led to the door that Mrs. Carmichael had emerged from. The hallway just beyond was narrow with a small light fixture at each end. Above the wainscoat the wall was painted light green. A spider hung from a web near the doorway he was to enter. Just inside, a large, red-faced man with grayish, thinning hair sat in a leather chair behind a desk facing the hallway.