The woman in the gray suit set the faded blue cap on the lid of the casket of my grandfather, and the room went quiet in a way I felt in my ribs. She was perhaps forty five, with short dark hair and a plain, strong face, and she carried herself like a person accustomed to being listened to. “My name is Anne Brubaker,” she said. “I am the Attorney General of the State of Kansas. And in 1989, I was a ten year old girl on a gravel road outside Hutchinson, standing at the end of my family driveway in the dark, waiting for Henry Kessler.”
“My father had left that winter,” she said. “My mother worked nights at the hospital. I was alone in the house until the bus came. I was afraid of the dark, so every morning I stood at the end of the drive at five forty, in a coat that did not fit, and I counted the minutes.” She smiled slightly. “Mr. Kessler pulled up each morning at five fifty five, five minutes early. Not on time. Early. I asked him why, once, in the fall. He said, Annie, the road is dark and a girl should not wait long. So he came five minutes early. Every single day for seven years.”
She lifted her chin. “When I was fourteen, I told him I wanted to be a lawyer. Nobody had ever said a thing like that in my house. He did not laugh. He said, Annie, I drove a girl to the capitol once, to see a bill signed. You will go further. And then, the next morning, there was a book on the front seat. A used copy of the Constitution, with a note on the cover in pencil.” She looked down at the cap. “It said: Read the first page, and then the second, and then the rest. I have not stopped reading since.”
A faded blue bus driver cap with a list folded in the band was laid on a casket by a state attorney general and gave one grandson the morning to bring his uncle back to the farm.
She picked the cap up, turned it over, and showed us the inside of the band. Tucked into it, folded very small, was a slip of yellowed paper. “He kept it in there for thirty years,” said Anne Brubaker. “A deacon found it when they were clearing out the closet.” She unfolded it carefully. “It is a list. Names, in his handwriting. Every child who rode his bus.” She turned it over. “Under each name, a note. This one says, Tommy, afraid of dogs, give him the front seat. This one, Lisa, no lunch, keep an apple in the glove box. This one, Annie, five minutes early.” Her voice caught. “There are four hundred and eleven names.”
The church was silent. A woman near the aisle began to cry, softly, and then another, and then, I realized, my uncle, the older brother of my father, who stood in the front row in his Sunday suit with his hands knotted before him, and who had said that morning on the porch that they would list the farm on Monday. His face was working. He is a big square man of sixty, a retired grain broker, with a hard jaw, and I had never seen him lose control. “Henry,” he whispered, to the casket. “Dad. I did not know.” His voice failed. He put his knuckles to his mouth.
Anne Brubaker looked at him with great compassion. “Mr. Kessler,” she said, “I understand there is a plan to sell the farm.” My uncle flinched. “I will not interfere. It is a family decision, and I am a guest.” She paused. “But I would like to tell you what the children of Route 9 have done. We are a few hundred now, scattered across the state. Last month, when we learned that he was ill, we started a fund. We meant to replace the roof of the farmhouse. And pay the taxes. And make sure the old man could stay where he was.” “We were too late. But the money is there.”
My uncle looked up. “How much?” he said, hoarsely. Anne said, “Two hundred and ninety four thousand dollars.” The congregation drew a single audible breath. “From four hundred and eleven people. The smallest gift was five dollars from a fourth grader, who wrote on the envelope: for the bus man.” Her eyes were bright. “It is yours to use as you see fit. It is a gift from the children. But I will tell you what the check says on the memo line. It says: Keep the farm.” She held out the folded list, and waited.
My uncle crossed the front of the church in three steps. He did not take the list. He took the hand of Anne Brubaker, in both of his big square hands, and he bowed his head over it, the way a man bows to a bishop. “Madam,” he said, “I was going to sell the farm of my father to a developer on Monday.” He swallowed. “I will not.” Then he began to weep in earnest, with his shoulders heaving, and Anne put her free hand on his arm, and across the church the sound rose and rose until it broke over all of us, a wave of grief and relief, and some women began to sing.
We held the funeral lunch in the fellowship hall of the Mennonite church, with a hundred and fifty pies, and the school buses lined up along the gravel road outside, eleven of them, yellow in the thin winter sun. The combines idled in the stubble. The children of Route 9, grown now, wandered among the tables, comparing notes on seats and stops, laughing, wiping their eyes. A big man in a John Deere cap told me my grandfather had once held a bus for twenty minutes in a blizzard so a boy could finish his breakfast at the kitchen table. “Said no kid should leave hungry,” he said.
The farm was not sold. In March, a crew of forty volunteers, most of them former riders, put a new roof on the old house in two days. My uncle ran the ladders. At the end, standing in the yard in the pale spring light, he took off his own cap and handed me a thing he had been holding behind his back. It was a small blue cap, faded and soft, the very one. “Tyler,” he said, “I think the bus driver wants to go home.” I put it on a peg beside the kitchen door, under the feed store calendar from 1987, and I left it there, and I swear that it looks like it is waiting for five fifty five.