The Night the School Gym Opened

Bus 4

Roger Fenske drives the Number 4 route, and he lives three blocks from the bus barn. When I called him he said, “I’ll be there in twenty,” and he was there in sixteen.

School buses are built for this. They run on a block heater overnight, and Roger had his plugged in at the barn the way he always did, so the engine turned over on the first try. The big yellow door folded open under the pump lights.

The drivers climbed on in their parkas and company caps, hauling duffels and thermoses and one cat in a carrier, which I had not expected.

The old man from Arkansas came last. He took the front seat. He was shivering so hard his dentures clicked.

“My name’s Otis Bergeron,” he said. “I’m seventy-one years old. I never in my life been this cold.”

“You sit right there, Otis,” I said. “I’ll have blankets for you in ten minutes.”

“I don’t want to be a bother.”

“You’re not.”

He nodded, and then he took my hand in both of his, which were like two blocks of wood, and held it about three seconds longer than I was ready for.

Just before the bus pulled out, headlights swung across its windshield and Dwight’s pickup slid to a stop at the curb. He got out and slammed the door. He stood there in the snow and looked at forty people in parkas looking back at him through the bus windows, and he did not say one word to any of them. Then he got back in his pickup and followed us.

Roger made two trips. The second one carried the last twelve and the young woman from Missouri, who had finally decided her refrigeration unit would survive without her. I had my soup promise in my pocket.

The gym

I have mopped that gym floor four thousand times. I know every dead spot in the finish and every squeaky board under the home bleachers.

I had never seen it filled the way it was about to be.

I propped the double doors, turned up the boiler, and pulled the folding bleachers back on the east side. Then I turned on every light in the building, so the room would be warm to look at as well as to stand in.

The fluorescents buzzed and came up slow, like old men getting out of chairs.

I called the head cook, Bev Sandvig, who lives on a farm east of town. She said, “How many?” and I said forty. She said, “Give me an hour,” and hung up.

Twenty minutes later, Gordon Gunderson’s fire truck backed up to the gym door with twelve army cots in the bed and two volunteers in turnout coats. Behind him came the church.

I mean that. I stood on the sidewalk and watched headlights turn onto School Street one after another at ten o’clock on a night when the governor had asked people to stay home.

Pastor Lund’s old Suburban was first, loaded with cots from the Lutheran basement, twenty of them, still folded flat, still tagged from a youth retreat in 1998.

Behind the Suburban came three pickups with big stockpots of soup in the beds. Behind those came a Buick with a woman I had known all my life, carrying a roaster of cornbread in her lap, wrapped in a stack of kitchen towels.

Six more cars came in behind them. Neighbors I had seen at the grocery store and at Friday football games. They carried grocery sacks of blankets and pillows and stacks of paper cups, a coffee urn the size of a trash can, a box of toothbrushes from the dentist’s office.