The Half Mile to the School Bus

Every Morning

That was a Thursday. On Friday we did it again. On Monday we did it again.

Seven o’clock out the door. Twelve minutes for a six-year-old to walk a half mile of gravel if nobody stops to look at a dead mouse, fifteen if somebody does. Seven fourteen at the blacktop. The bus at seven twenty.

In the afternoon I set my alarm for three thirty, because I sleep after the morning walk and wake for it, and I walked back down and stood at the end of the lane and waited for the bus to bring him home. Then we walked back up together, and he told me everything about his day, all half a mile of it.

Every morning, Eli counted the fence posts.

Every morning, he got a different number. Ninety-eight. A hundred and twenty. Once, a hundred and four, because he got to talking about a girl named Kim who could whistle with two fingers and forgot to count for a while.

Pete knew the real number. He had bought the posts. One hundred twelve, counting the braces. Some mornings Eli hit it. Most mornings he did not, and I let him be wrong, because there is a whole long life ahead of him for being corrected, and the lane was not the place for it.

Every morning we walked past the trailer.

Every morning Vonda’s kitchen curtain was open when we came down the lane, and every morning, when the bus pulled up, Dorothea lifted her hand off the wheel and waved at the house across the road.

She never said a word to me about it. She did not have to. She waved at Vonda the way you wave at a neighbor you have known for thirty years, and then she drove sixty children to school past a trailer everybody on that bus could see.

I want to say clearly: I never once looked at that window on purpose. I did not stop and stare. I did not shake my head. I did not say a thing about Vonda to anybody at church or the plant or the grocery store.

But Kalona is a small place, and Washington County is not much bigger.

The Amish man two farms east drove his buggy by every morning at about seven, headed to his brother’s to help with chores, and he saw a woman and a little boy walking a half mile down a gravel lane to a bus that used to come to the house. He saw the trailer. He tipped his hat to us every day.

The girls at the plant asked why Cleta was dropping me at the end of the lane. I said I liked the walk.

The second Sunday, at church, a woman who sat behind Vonda in the choir came up to me after the service and squeezed my hand and did not say anything at all, and then went and stood with Vonda for a while at the coffee urn.

I did not ask what they talked about.