The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

Bexley finished those three bicycles that same week and I asked him never again to keep more than one in the shed at a time, whatever the schedule cost us. He agreed, though I could tell it pained his efficiency to slow the work down.

“Maybe she’s just having fun with us,” I heard one of the younger guards say once, not unkindly.

“Or maybe we’re missing something,” Vernal answered him, and he wasn’t wrong, though it would be thirty years before he found out what.

In between all that suspicion, something else was happening that none of the men at the gate ever connected to me at all. About every other month, a bicycle would turn up, quiet as anything, leaned against a porch rail or a fence post at a house where a child had been walking four miles to school. Nobody signed a note. Nobody claimed credit. The Prewitt boys got two between them that spring, and I will never forget watching the youngest one ride circles in his own dirt yard until it got too dark to see, laughing every single time he nearly tipped over.

The Coble girl got hers in October, painted a deep blue that had nothing of Excelsior green left in it, with a basket Bexley had wired on himself because he said a girl riding four miles ought to have somewhere to put her books. Her mother cried at the church potluck that Sunday, not knowing who to thank, and half the women at that potluck cried right along with her without knowing why either, which is a particular kind of grace this county has always had, crying for a stranger’s good fortune without needing the whole story first.