The Minute I Held the Bus

“Why that?” I asked him once in the spring.

He shrugged. “Roads,” he said.

That was the longest conversation we had in twelve years.

His last morning was a Friday in May. He climbed up the steps, patted the dash once the way you’d pat a horse, and sat in the seat behind mine.

I went to his graduation. I wore my good suit and sat in the back row of the gym with Doris, and when they called “Daniel Merle Reinke” he walked across that stage on a titanium hip and took his diploma.

I did not clap loud. I am not a loud man. Doris clapped for the both of us.

I figured I’d see him at the grocery store once in a while, and he’d say “Mr. Boyd,” and I’d say “Danny,” and that would be the whole of it. But I kept holding the minute.

I told Doris it was habit. For seventeen more years I came to the Reinke mailbox and opened the door and sat there sixty seconds with the engine running.

Danny’s folks had sold the cattle and moved to a house in town when Merle’s back gave out. The lane was empty, the cedars thick as a wall.

I would look down it and say nothing. I’m not a man who prays out loud. But there was a thing I said, sitting there, every morning, in my own head.

I said, “Lord, let them all get here.” Not Danny. Everybody. All the ones I would never see.

I was just a bus driver, and it was just a minute. But I figured if I was going to be stubborn about one thing, I could be stubborn about that.

The decision to quit came in March, from my knee and not from any wisdom. The doctor in Grand Island said I could keep climbing in and out of a school bus six times a day or I could keep the knee, he did not care which, but not both.

Verlyn, retired himself by then, said the last day of school was the cleanest. I told Doris and Verlyn I did not want a party. I do not like being looked at. Doris said she would see to that.

I should have heard it right there. When Doris Boyd says she’ll see to it, a thing is going to be seen to.

The last week I drove it slow. I noticed things I had stopped seeing years before, like the leaning grain bin at the Dvorak place and the stock tank where the Pokorny horses stood in the shade. I said good morning to the kids as if I would remember each one, and I knew I wouldn’t, and I said it anyway.