The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

“I’ll show you this afternoon,” I said. “Bring your map to the feed store. And bring Kyle.”

So that is where it got fixed. Not in a boardroom. On the counter at the feed store, between the seed catalogs and the jar of dog biscuits, with Jeff ringing up mineral blocks around us.

Dr. Whitfield unrolled his map and Kyle and I went over it with a pencil.

It did not take as long as you would think. The computer had not known about the Flat Creek bridge. Route 4 and Route 7 were both crossing it twice a day to pick up children on each other’s side of the creek, because of how the old attendance lines had run. We swapped five stops between them. We moved one turnaround from a gravel lot to the Assembly of God parking lot, which saved a mile of backing up. Kyle pointed out that Route 2 ran four miles of empty road every afternoon to get back to the bus barn when it could park overnight at the driver’s own place, the way they did it when I started.

Dr. Whitfield added it up twice on the feed store’s calculator.

“That is all seven spurs back,” he said slowly, “with a little over two miles a day to spare.”

“Nobody asked the drivers,” Kyle said. He said it respectfully, but he said it.

“No,” Dr. Whitfield said. “Nobody did. That was my mistake, and it will not happen again.”

The board met the third Thursday in February, in the high school library. Dale took off work after all and sat beside me. Reverend Dunn came, and Mr. Hadley, and Donna Pruitt in her plant jacket, straight off shift. Kyle and Amber sat in the back with the baby.

When transportation came up on the agenda, Dr. Whitfield stood.

“In August I redrew our bus routes to save fuel,” he said. “I did it from my office. One result was that nine children on Coon Hollow Road were assigned a walk of nearly a mile and a half, on gravel, across a creek, before daylight. It met our policy. It was wrong, and I am the one who drew it.”

You could have heard a pencil drop.

“Those children did not walk it,” he said. “Not one morning. They did not walk it because a driver I had just demoted borrowed her church’s van, and her church bought the gas, and she has carried them to school since the first day without pay and without one complaint to this board or to the newspaper. A second driver, Mr. Bender, told me to my face that he would not drive a route that left them. He was right to. The two of them then sat down with me and found the savings I could not find. The revised routes in front of you restore every stop and still meet the budget.”

He asked the board to change the walking policy, too. Half a mile, and no creek crossings. It passed without a no.

Then he asked me to stay after.

It was just the three of us in the library, him and me and Kyle, with the custodian stacking chairs.

“Route 7 is yours, Mrs. Krause,” Dr. Whitfield said. “At your full rate, with your years. It should not have left you. I am sorry, and I am not saying that for the minutes.”

“And Kyle?”