The Half Mile to the School Bus

The Mailbox

In the second week, on a Tuesday, Eli came home from school with a drawing.

He had done it during free time. It was two horses, one brown and one darker brown, standing in a field of green crayon with a fence in front of them. Over the fence he had drawn a big yellow sun with lines coming off it.

“It’s Vonda’s horses,” he said. “Their names are Duke and Penny. She told me once.”

“It’s very good,” I said.

“Can I give it to her?”

I stood in the kitchen with the drawing in my hand. I thought about every reason to say no. I thought about Vonda closing her door on me. I thought about the curtain falling shut.

Then I thought about my son, who is six, who knew those horses’ names from a year and a half ago when a sad woman gave him sugar cubes.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “On the way to the bus. You can put it in her mailbox.”

So Wednesday morning we walked down the lane in the frost, and Eli counted posts, and got a hundred and nine. At the bottom of the lane, instead of standing on our side of the blacktop, I held his hand and we looked both ways twice and walked across to Vonda’s mailbox.

It is a black mailbox on a post Lavon welded out of an old plow beam. Eli opened it and put in the drawing, folded in half, and closed it, and then he put the red flag up all by himself, because he knows that is what you do when there is something inside.

We walked back across. The bus came over the rise. Eli got on and Dorothea waved at the house.

I did not look at the window that morning at all. I could not have told you if the curtain was open or shut.

That afternoon when I walked down to meet the bus, the flag was down.

Pete Comes Home

Pete came home that Friday night at nine, and Saturday morning he walked the lane with me even though there was no school, just to see it.

He stood by his fence and looked down toward the road at the white trailer for a long time. My husband is a big quiet man, and he gets a look on his face when something is wrong that he is not allowed to fix, a kind of stillness around the jaw.

“I should go over there,” he said.

“You can,” I said. “But not to fight.”

“I don’t want to fight her.” He leaned on a T-post. “Mandy, Lavon told me to put that fence up. Six, seven years ago. He stood right here and said, ‘Pete, that’s your ground, you fence it whenever you want, the horses’ll live.’ I said I’d wait till we needed it. I never told her that.”

“Then maybe you should tell her that,” I said.

He went over that afternoon. I watched from the kitchen. He knocked, and she opened the door, and he stood on her porch with his cap in his hands and talked for about four minutes. She did not ask him in. She did not close the door on him either.

He came back across the road and sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of coffee before he said anything.

“She listened,” he said. “That’s all. She just listened. She said she’d think on it.”

“Did the trailer move?”

“No,” he said. “The trailer didn’t move.”