Who Left the Firewood at My Door

Of course he had. Ray drove the Tobin school bus for thirty-five years, Route 4, the long gravel loop north of town. If you grew up within ten miles of us in those decades, you’d been on Ray’s bus. He knew every child by name, who had a mother with a bad back and who had a father out of work. He used to say you could tell most of what you needed to know about a family by how the child said good morning.

“My dad left that October,” Jeff said. “He went to Texas for an oil job and said he’d send money. The first check came, and then it quit. Mom worked nights at the care center in town. We heated with a wood stove, and Dad always did the wood. That fall he hadn’t, and she hadn’t the money to buy it, and she wouldn’t ask anybody.”

“Cathy,” I said. The name came up out of me. “Cathy Mortensen.”

“Yes, ma’am. Mom used to burn nothing till supper. She’d save it for the night. Perry and me, we got up in a house that was thirty-eight degrees, and went out to the bus in our school clothes. I didn’t have gloves. I’d lost one, and Mom hadn’t the money for a pair, and I didn’t tell her.”

His voice had gone very even.

“One morning in December, I got on the bus and my hands were so cold I couldn’t hold the rail. Your husband looked at them in the mirror. He said, ‘Jeff, where are your gloves?’ And I said, ‘Mom’s saving the wood for night, Mr. Oakes. We only burn it after supper.’ I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t a kid who said things. I think I was just so cold it fell out.”

I closed my eyes.

“He said, ‘That a fact.’ That was all. ‘That a fact.’ And he put the bus in gear.”

Kaitlyn had stopped swinging her boots.

“The next morning there was wood on our porch. A whole stack, split. And kindling in a bundle, tied with orange baling twine. It was there every morning till March. Mom stood at the window the first day and cried. She told me it was the church. But I was twelve, not stupid. One morning I got up at four-thirty and stood in the dark at the front window, and I saw a pickup come up the road with its lights off. And I saw him. Your husband. Splitting wood in our frozen yard with his breath smoking, before he went to drive a school bus.”

I held my cup with both hands and said nothing.

“I never told anyone. I never told him I knew. I’d get on the bus, and he’d say, ‘Morning, Jeff,’ and I’d say, ‘Morning, Mr. Oakes,’ and that was the whole of it for six more years. Not when I graduated. Not when I came home from Des Moines with my tail between my legs. I’d see him at the co-op and he’d say, ‘Jeff,’ and nod, and I’d nod. I always thought, I should thank him. And I always thought, if I thank him, I’ve made him say what he did. A man who does that in the dark doesn’t want it said.”

He stopped.

“And then I waited too long.”