The Bible School Under the Cottonwood

The Boy in the Back

Logan Brekke came on Monday too. His grandma, Doris, dropped him off in her old Ford Ranger. She is seventy-six and works mornings at the school kitchen in the summer program, and she walked all the way to the hay bales to shake my hand.

“He hasn’t stopped talking about it since Thursday,” she said. “His mom works nights at the nursing home in Lisbon. She can’t get him to things in the day. I can’t do the sixty dollars. I hope it’s all right.”

“There is no sixty dollars here,” I said.

Doris held onto my hand a little longer than she had to. Then she went back to the Ranger and sat with the windows down for ten minutes before she drove off, like she wanted to be sure he would stay.

Logan sat at the very back that first morning. He was eight, small for it, with a buzz cut and a T-shirt from a fireworks stand.

He did not sing. He watched everybody else sing with his hands in his lap like somebody might ask him for a ticket.

On Monday the story was creation. I used Marlene’s felt figures, the same ones from the shoebox, a little faded now, and stuck the sun and the moon and the fish and the cows up on a board one at a time.

When I got to the cows, three of the farm kids said “Holsteins” at the exact same time, and everybody laughed. Logan laughed too. It was the first noise I had heard him make.

Tuesday

Tuesday there were thirty-six. Word gets around a small town faster than a hailstorm. A mom from town called me Monday night and asked, very quietly, whether it was only for kids who could not pay.

“It’s for anybody,” I said. “But if you’ve already paid for the church one, go to the church one. They worked hard on it.”

She said she had not paid. She said she had been embarrassed to say so. I told her I had a bag of cotton balls with her kids’ names on it.

Tuesday was Noah. Marlene sat at the end of a picnic table in a lawn chair with her cane against her knee, showing kids how to glue cotton balls on paper plates for clouds and make the animals go two by two.

We hung every craft on my clothesline with my clothespins to dry, because there was nowhere else to put them.

By eleven the clothesline was full of paper arks and rainbows and crooked giraffes, flapping in the wind like laundry from heaven.

At snack time, Logan came up and stood next to my hay bale while the other kids ate graham crackers. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “Is God allowed at a farm?”

I set down my cup. “What do you mean, honey?”

“Grandma says God lives at church.” He looked at the cross on the garage. “This isn’t church.”

“God is allowed anywhere,” I told him. “But I’ll tell you a secret. I think a farm is where He likes it best. He made the first garden, after all. He was a farmer before He was anything.”

Logan thought about that like a little old man. Then he nodded and went back and ate four graham crackers, and on the next song, he did the motions. Just the hands, not the words. But he did them.