The Night the School Gym Opened

The last morning

The plows finally got through on Wednesday at ten.

You could hear it first. A low rumble on the frontage road, then a long scrape, and then the sound of an air horn, three long blasts, from somewhere out near the interstate on-ramp.

The gym went completely quiet. Then, all at once, forty people stood up and began to pick up their things.

I had expected them to leave quickly. I hadn’t expected them to fold their own blankets.

They did. Every one of them folded a blanket, squared the corners, and set it at the foot of a cot, the way you do in the army, or the way you do when your mother raised you right. The Texas man wiped the dust off the baseboards with his sleeve. The Georgia driver swept a spot that was already clean.

Bev Sandvig handed out paper sacks. Sandwiches, apples, two cookies each.

A man from Iowa shook my hand and said, “I’ve driven that road for twenty-six years and I thought I knew every town on it. I didn’t know Alder.”

“Come back in the summer,” I said. “We’ve got a parade.”

Roger Fenske made six trips on Bus 4, running the drivers back to their trucks in groups of seven. The young woman from Missouri went with the first load, and I carried a cup of soup out to her trailer myself, since I had promised.

Otis Bergeron waited by the gym door with his canvas bag over his shoulder.

“Nicole,” he said. “I want to give you something.”

“You don’t have to give me anything.”

“I know I don’t.” He pressed a small square of paper into my hand, folded in quarters, soft from his pocket. “Read it after I’m gone. Not before.”

“Otis.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

He nodded once. He put his thin gloves on and walked down the hall in his gray wool socks with the hole in the toe, and I realized he had forgotten to put his boots on. I ran after him and handed them to him by the door.

He laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh. He sat on the bench in the hallway and pulled them on, one and then the other.

“Seventy-one years,” he said. “And a school custodian has to remind me about my boots.”

“Drive safe.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I stood at the glass door and watched him walk across the lot with his bag, through snow banks higher than his waist. The bus went out ahead of him, brake lights red in the cold bright morning.

I didn’t open the paper until I got in my pickup and shut the door and turned the heater up.

It was a page from a pocket notebook. It was written in pencil in a careful, slanting hand.

I’ve been hauling freight for forty-three years. In all that time I’ve been turned away from a lot of doors. You are the first person who ever walked out to the lot in the dark and knocked on mine.

Underneath that, in smaller letters:

My wife’s name was Lucille. She would have liked you. Otis.

I sat in the pickup with the engine running for a long time.