The Half Mile to the School Bus

Lavon died a year ago this past October. Heart attack in the hog barn he no longer used for hogs. Pete was one of the men who carried him out of the Mennonite church on a gray Tuesday, and I brought a ham loaf to the house.

After that, Vonda turned the horses out on her side, and we did not see her much. She has a son in Des Moines who comes at Christmas. She has church on Sunday. Mostly she has those two horses.

In September, Pete bought four bottle calves from a dairy over by Wellman. We wanted Eli to raise them. Pete grew up with calves and he wanted his boy to know what it is to get up and feed something that depends on you.

Calves need fence. So Pete spent two weekends in September setting posts down the survey line along the lane, from our yard down to where the Ritter fence corners, and he strung new woven wire with a strand of barbed on top. He set steel T-posts every twenty feet and wood posts at the braces. Eli handed him the clips.

He did it right. He had the county survey pins found and flagged before he set a single post. He did not take one inch that was not on our deed.

But it cut the horses off the strip.

The First Morning

That first Monday I walked Eli back into the house and set him at the table with a bowl of Cheerios, because I did not know what else to do with a crying six-year-old at seven twenty in the morning.

My car was sitting at the garage in Kalona waiting on a water pump that was supposed to come Friday. Pete had the pickup parked at the terminal in Cedar Rapids, where it sits all week while he is out. I had gotten home from the plant that morning in a ride from a girl I work with, Cleta, who lives past us toward Riverside.

So I could not drive him to school. The school is nine miles away. I called the transportation office as soon as it opened.

The man who runs the buses for the district is a patient man who has heard every kind of complaint there is. He told me Dorothea had radioed in. She was not going to swing a seventy-two passenger bus into a lane with a trailer nose three feet from her mirror, and she was not going to back it in either.

“She did right,” he said. “I’d have written her up if she tried it.”

“I know she did right,” I said. “I’m not mad at Dorothea.”

He told me that if the lane could not be used, the stop would move to the nearest safe point on the road, which was the blacktop at the end of our lane.

But a new stop on a fifty-five mile an hour county road had to be looked at first. He had to drive out and check the sight lines over that rise, and then it went on the route sheet. He said he could have it done by Thursday.

“Until then,” he said, “she’ll keep coming by, and if the lane’s open she’ll turn in.”

I thanked him. I hung up. Eli asked if he was in trouble for missing school, and I told him no, he was not in trouble, and nobody was.

Then I put my coat back on and walked across the road.