The prize for the county spelling bee in the spring of 1947 was a dictionary, and I wanted it less than anyone in that courthouse, because I already had one.

It sat on a stand in our front room, where my father had put it the year I was born, with the idea, I think, that I would absorb it through the air. He ran the feed store on the square, and he believed in two things without reservation: the Democratic Party and the improving power of a large book. I had read ours cover to cover by the time I was ten, the way other children read the Sears catalog, and I could spell nearly anything you cared to throw at me. This was not a virtue. It was simply a fact about me, like my red hair.

Opal Sizemore sat beside me in Miss Lyda Combs's room at the grade school, and Opal could spell nearly anything too. The difference was that Opal had never owned a book in her life. Her father had worked at a mine up the hollow until it shut, and there were eight children in their house, and whatever Opal knew she had borrowed. She borrowed from Miss Combs's shelf, and from the church, and from me. She read with her whole body, bent over the page, lips moving, one finger running along under the line as if she were afraid the words would get away from her before she could memorize them.

The prize dictionary was on a table at the front of the courtroom, where the judge usually sat. It was new. It had a red cloth cover and gold letters on the spine, and a ribbon to keep your place, and I watched Opal look at it all morning the way you would look at a window in a house you knew you would never live in.

*

There were thirty-one of us at the start, from every school in the county. By eleven o'clock there were nine. By noon there were two, and you have guessed already which two.

The pronouncer was Mr. Hollingsworth from the newspaper, a tall man with a voice like a church organ. He gave Opal mischievous, and she spelled it without a quaver, and there was a little patter of applause from the back where her mother sat with the baby. He gave me rhythm, and I spelled it. He gave Opal lieutenant. She spelled it. He gave me necessary.

I knew that word the way I knew my own name. One c, two s's, a shirt with one collar and two sleeves, Miss Combs had taught us. I opened my mouth to say it, and I looked, for no reason at all, at the front row, where Opal sat with her hands knotted in her lap. She was not looking at me. She was looking past me, at the table, at the red dictionary with the ribbon.

I would like to tell you that I thought it through. I did not. I was twelve. I only knew, all at once, that I was about to win something I had no use for, and that the person beside me was about to lose something she would remember for the rest of her life.

"Necessary," I said. "N-E-S-E-S-S-A-R-Y. Necessary."

Mr. Hollingsworth looked at me over his glasses for a long moment. Then he rang the little bell.

Opal stood up. He gave her necessary, as the rules required, and she spelled it correctly, and then he gave her sovereign, and she spelled that too, and the county spelling bee of 1947 was over. The courtroom stood up and clapped. Her mother cried. Mr. Hollingsworth put the red dictionary into Opal's arms, and she held it against her chest the way you would hold a baby, or a cat that might jump.

*

Nobody said anything to me about it except Miss Combs. She drove me home in her old Plymouth, because my father had to get back to the store, and she didn't say a word the whole way until we pulled up in front of our house. Then she turned off the engine and sat with her hands on the wheel.

"You have never misspelled that word in your life," she said.

I didn't answer.

"I won't ask you," Miss Combs said. "And I will tell you something I don't want you to take the wrong way. Don't make a habit of losing, Ruth. The world is going to try very hard to teach girls like you to lose on purpose, and you mustn't let it." She looked out the windshield at our porch, at my mother's ferns. "But that was a kindness today. That was a real one. I just want you to know that somebody saw it."

I got out of the car. I did not cry until I got upstairs, and I could not have told you then what I was crying about. I am not sure I could tell you now.

*

Opal and I stayed friends through high school, and then less, the way it goes. She went to Cincinnati on the bus in 1953 with a cardboard suitcase and a job at a department store, and she went to night school, and eventually she became a librarian, which surprised no one. I went to the college in Richmond and became a teacher, which surprised no one either. We sent Christmas cards for forty-five years. Hers always had a line or two about what she was reading. Mine always had a line or two about my students. We saw each other perhaps four times in all those years, and every time we talked as if we had last spoken the day before.

She died last fall, of her heart, in Cincinnati. I drove up for the funeral. It was a big one; librarians know a great many people. Afterward, at her daughter's house, when the ham and the deviled eggs were mostly gone, her daughter came and found me in the kitchen. She had a package in brown paper under her arm.

"Mama said this was yours," she said. "She was very particular about it. She wrote your name on it five years ago and put it in the cedar chest."

I knew what it was before I opened it. The red cloth had gone brown at the edges and the gold on the spine was nearly gone, and somebody had mended the binding at least twice with library tape. The ribbon was still there.

On the flyleaf, in handwriting I had seen on forty-five Christmas cards, she had written:

For Ruth, who always knew how to spell necessary.
So did I. Thank you. — O.

I sat down at her daughter's kitchen table, in my good black dress, and I opened that dictionary to the N's. I don't know why. I suppose I wanted to see it. And there it was, where it had always been, in its column between necessarily and necessitate: one collar, two sleeves, exactly as Miss Combs had said, the way it had been all along.

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