The Half Mile to the School Bus

The Fourth Morning

Thursday I got home from the plant at six thirty. Cleta dropped me at the end of the lane because I asked her to, and I walked the half mile up to the house in the gray light just before the sun, timing it in my head. It took me eight minutes. It would take Eli longer.

I got him up at six forty. I made him oatmeal with brown sugar. I braided my own hair so it would stay under my stocking cap, and I put on my barn coat and my gray cap and my boots.

I bundled Eli up in his navy coat and his red cap and his mittens, and I put the dinosaur backpack on him, which is too big for him by about half. His grandmother bought it in August and he would not hear of a smaller one.

“Are we driving?” he said.

“We’re walking,” I said. “All the way to the blacktop. And I’m going to put you on the bus myself.”

At five minutes to seven we went out the door.

The sun had just come up over the timber to the east, low and bright and gold, and every blade of grass along the lane was white with frost. Our breath came out in clouds. The calves bawled at us from the barn lot. The gravel crunched under our boots.

Eli held my hand. He swung the backpack every few steps, the way he does when he is thinking.

And then, maybe a hundred feet down the lane, he started counting the fence posts.

“One,” he said. “Two. Three.”

Pete’s posts. Every twenty feet, steel T-posts, and the wood posts at the braces, all down the lane toward the road. Eli counted every one of them out loud, his mitten in my glove, his breath puffing.

He lost his place around forty and started over at thirty. He skipped fifty-six entirely. I did not correct him.

Up ahead, the white trailer sat across the mouth of the lane. Past it, on the blacktop, I could see a yellow shape come over the rise.

We walked faster. Eli started to run and I held him back, because he had never been near that blacktop alone and I was not going to start now. We came down past the end of Pete’s fence, past the trailer, which sat there white and empty with its hitch resting on a block.

Across the road, Vonda’s kitchen curtain was open.

I did not look at it long. I walked Eli out to the edge of the blacktop and the bus stopped with its red lights flashing and its stop arm out, and Dorothea opened the door.

“Well, good morning, Eli Selk,” she said. “Long time no see.”

“I walked,” Eli said. “I counted the posts. There’s a hundred and six.”

“Is that right,” Dorothea said.

I lifted him up the first big step. He climbed the rest. He found his seat by the window on our side, the third one back, and pressed his mitten on the glass.

Dorothea looked down at me from the driver’s seat. Then she looked past me, across the road, at Vonda’s kitchen window. She lifted her hand off the wheel and gave a little wave toward the house. A plain wave, the kind you give anybody on a county road.

Then she closed the door and pulled out, and the bus went over the next rise and was gone.

I stood there by myself at the end of the lane in the frost. The trailer sat beside me. Across the road, the curtain fell shut.

I walked home.