The Half Mile to the School Bus

The school bus came over the rise on the blacktop at seven fifteen that Monday, slowed for our lane the way it had every school morning for two years, and then just kept rolling slowly past.

I was standing in our yard in my barn coat with Eli’s lunch box in my hand. Eli was beside me in his red stocking cap and his navy coat, his dinosaur backpack hanging off him like a saddle on a calf.

“Mama,” he said, “she forgot us.”

She had not forgotten us. I could see it from the yard, half a mile down, even with the sun just up and glaring off the frost. A white two-horse trailer sat at the mouth of our lane, nosed in tight along the ditch, right where the bus needed its room to swing in.

Dorothea Haas has driven that route for eleven years. She is fifty-eight and she has never once been late to our lane, not in snow, not in the spring mud when the gravel goes soft. I watched her brake lights come on at the blacktop and stay on a long time.

Then the bus went on toward the next farm, and Eli stood in the yard with his backpack on and his lip starting to go.

My name is Mandy Selk. I am thirty-four. I work nights in the office at the egg plant west of Kalona, ten at night to six in the morning, and I am home every morning by half past six to get my son on the bus. That is the whole reason I took nights.

My husband, Pete, drives long haul. He leaves Sunday afternoon and comes home Friday night, and in between he calls from truck stops in Nebraska and Ohio and places I have only seen on his logbook. That week he was hauling to Denver.

So it was me and Eli and a white horse trailer, and I knew exactly whose trailer it was.

The Fence

To understand the trailer you have to understand the fence, and to understand the fence you have to understand the lane.

Our place sits at the end of a gravel lane that runs a half mile north off the county blacktop. Our house, a machine shed, a little barn, and nine acres. The lane belongs to us, but along most of its length it runs right beside Ritter ground.

Lavon Ritter farmed that ground for forty years. He and his wife, Vonda, lived across the blacktop in a white farmhouse with a red barn behind it, and when they bought two horses for their retirement, Lavon used to let them graze the strip of grass along our lane.

That strip was ours. It ran between the gravel and the survey line, maybe twenty feet wide in places. There had never been a fence on it, only a few old cedar posts somebody set during the Depression, and nobody minded the horses. Lavon would lead them over in the evening and stand there with his cap pushed back, talking to Pete about rain.