The Minute I Held the Bus

The district was short a driver that August. Verlyn Kuehl, who ran the transportation barn, was a friend from church, and he asked if I could pass the physical.

I could. I got the commercial license in three weeks and the school bus endorsement the week after, and they handed me the keys to an old International with a five-speed transmission and a heater that worked on one side.

Route 4 was eleven stops and forty-one miles of Valley County gravel, out north of town and around the river bottoms and back by way of the county line.

Every stop had a minute written next to it on the route sheet. Verlyn had built that sheet with a stopwatch and a pencil, and he stood by it the way a preacher stands by a hymn number.

I had nineteen kids on that bus the first week. I knew every one of them by the second Tuesday.

The Reinke place was stop number eleven, the last one before the school. It sits a quarter mile back off the county road, at the end of a farm lane lined with cedar trees somebody planted in the fifties.

The mailbox is out at the road. The house is a white two-story with a porch, and from the mailbox you can see the whole lane running down to it, straight as a ruler.

Merle Reinke ran cattle and hauled grain for the co-op. His wife, Joyce, worked the early shift in the laundry at the hospital in Ord. They both left before daylight, which is just farm life, and I knew it from the inside.

Which meant that their boy walked that lane alone every morning. He was six years old, in first grade, and his name was Danny.

I saw him from the road the first morning, a small shape coming out from between the cedars, carrying a pack that was nearly as big as he was.

And I saw right away that something was the matter with the way he walked.

His left hip had never grown right. What I saw that morning was a hitch and a drag, the leg swinging out and around and the body coming along after it, slow and steady and not one bit faster than it could go.

That lane was a quarter mile. It took him about four minutes to walk it.

I had one minute on the sheet for that stop.

For the first three weeks I did what the sheet said. I stopped, I opened the door, I waited the minute, and when the minute was up I closed the door and drove.