The Half Mile to the School Bus

Vonda’s Porch

Vonda Ritter is sixty-one years old. She is a tall woman with gray hair she keeps short, and she came to the door in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a dish towel in her hand. She did not ask me in.

“Vonda,” I said, “your trailer is blocking the bus.”

“It’s on my ground,” she said.

She was right. I had looked on the walk over. The trailer sat on her side of the ditch, on the grass approach to her pasture gate, parked tight along the road. It sat right where our gravel met her ditch apron. A car could still squeeze past it into the lane. A school bus could not.

“Eli missed school this morning,” I said.

Something moved in her face for one second. Then it went flat.

“Your husband put up a fence,” she said. “He waited until Lavon was in the ground a year, and then he put up a fence where Lavon’s horses grazed for nine years. He could have asked me. He could have come over here and asked me.”

“It’s on the survey line,” I said. “It’s our ground, Vonda. Pete had it surveyed.”

“I know whose ground it is,” she said. “I’m on my ground too.”

And she closed the door. Not hard. She just closed it.

I stood on her porch for a minute. I could hear her horses moving in the barn behind the house, and the wind in the dry corn across the road, and somewhere far off a semi gearing down on Highway 22.

I walked back across the road.

Why I Did Not Fight Her

People have asked me since why I did not call somebody. The sheriff. A lawyer. The township.

The honest answer is that there was nobody to call. The trailer was on her side of the ditch. Nobody was going to make a widow move her own trailer off her own pasture approach. I have worked nights with women who have been in feuds with neighbors for thirty years over less, and I have seen what it does to them.

And Pete was gone five days out of seven. Whatever I started, I would be finishing alone, across the road from her, every morning and every night, for as long as we lived there.

That night Pete called from a truck stop outside North Platte. I told him the whole thing. He was quiet for a long time, and I could hear the truck stop sounds behind him, the speaker calling a shower number.

“I’ll turn around,” he said. “I’ll drop this load and deadhead home.”

“You will not,” I said. “You’ll lose the load and the next one, and she’ll still have her trailer.”

“Then I’ll pull the fence,” he said. “I’ll pull the whole thing Saturday. The calves can go in the barn lot.”

“You will not do that either,” I said. “You did nothing wrong. You did it right.”

He breathed out. My husband is not a man who likes to be told he cannot fix something. But he knows me.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

I did not know yet. I told him I would think about it.