The Half Mile to the School Bus

The Third Week

Monday the trailer was still there, and we walked.

The weather turned the third week. It got down to fourteen degrees one morning and the frost on the fence wire was so thick it looked like the wire had grown fur. I put long underwear under Eli’s jeans and a scarf under his red cap, and he complained the whole first hundred feet and then forgot to.

I hummed while we walked some mornings. My grandmother used to sing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” over the dishes, and it is the one I know all the words to, and it fits a walking pace. Eli does not know the words, but he knows the tune, and some mornings he hummed it along with me between posts.

“Seventy-one,” he would say. And hum. “Seventy-two.”

I will tell you that some mornings were hard. I would get home from eight hours at the plant, my eyes burning from the computer screen, and I would rather have done anything in the world than walk a half mile in fourteen degrees and then a half mile back. Some mornings I was angry the whole walk down and had to pray about it the whole walk back.

But I never let Eli see it. To him it was an adventure. It was his time with me, before the bus and after it, a whole mile a day of just the two of us talking about dinosaurs and his teacher and why the calves have different colored faces.

By then I realized I had stopped wanting the bus to come up the lane at all. I did not say that to anybody. But it was true.

Vonda at the Fence

It was the first Thursday in December when it happened.

We came down the lane at seven, the frost bright in full daylight, our breath in the air. Eli was at post eighty-something. And at the bottom of the lane, by the end of Pete’s fence, somebody was standing in the frost.

It was Vonda.

She had on a brown chore coat and a knit cap and her hands were in her pockets. She was standing beside the last brace post with her back to the trailer, and she watched us come the whole last stretch of the lane.

Eli stopped counting. He held my hand tighter. When we got close, I stopped. I did not say anything. I let her say it.

She looked at Eli first. She looked at him for a long time, at his red cap and his too big backpack and his mittens.

“I got your picture,” she said to him. “Of Duke and Penny.”

“Did you like it?” Eli said.

“I put it on my refrigerator,” she said. “Right in the middle. Lavon used to keep the feed bill there. Now it’s your horses.”

Eli smiled at her the way only a six-year-old can, with his whole face. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were wet, and it was not only the cold.

“I watched you every morning,” she said. “Every single morning for a month, the two of you walking down past my trailer. And Dorothea waving at me. I’d stand in the kitchen and she’d wave at me like nothing was wrong, and I knew she knew, and I knew everybody on that bus knew.”