The Minute I Held the Bus

The rest of the route was an ordinary last day of school. There were only nine children left on Route 4 by then, the farms being fewer and the families smaller, and every one of them climbed on with a pack full of the year’s leftovers and a long look at the big man in the fourth seat.

I gave each of them their minute, the same as always. A boy named Colt Vodehnal came out of his house with one shoe untied, and I let him sit down on the bottom step and fix it. Nobody ran.

Marty did not say a word the whole way. He looked out the window with his cap on his knee and watched the fields go by, and now and then I caught him in the big mirror, watching the back of my head.

Stop eleven was the Reinke place.

The lane had not been lived on in years. Danny’s folks had sold the cattle and moved to a house in town when Merle’s back gave out, and the cedars had grown in thick as a wall. The mailbox out at the road was a new black one, and there was no one at it.

I pulled up anyway. I opened the door. For seventeen years I had done that every morning with nobody to wait for, and I did it that day.

I looked down the lane and I said what I always said in my own head. Lord, let them all get here.

A full minute went by on the dash clock. Behind me, Marty Halloran did not move or speak, and I was grateful to him for it.

Then I closed the door and drove the last two miles to the school.

The children went in with their packs and their lunch sacks and their summer plans. Marty stayed in his seat until the aisle was clear. Then he came up to the front and put out his hand, and I shook it.

“Danny wanted to come,” he said. “The county has him on the north road today, running the grader, and he couldn’t get anybody to cover. He was sore about it.”

“You tell him I said it’s all right.”

“I’ll tell him,” Marty said. “Your wife called me back in March. She said you’d want to be left alone, and you shouldn’t be.”

So that was what the humming was.

He stopped on the bottom step and put one hand flat on the rail. Then he went on across the lot to the pickup somebody had driven over for him, and he did not turn around.

I set the brake. I walked the aisle the way I had walked it ten thousand times, looking at every seat for a lunch sack or a mitten.