Present, Fifteen (7)

Anne Prevette came and got her out of the gym.

She did not say anything in front of the children. She crouched
down at the edge of the half circle and put her hand on Joyce's
arm and left it there, and Joyce put the puppet down on the floor
in front of her and stood up.

There were still eleven children in the gym whose people had not
come.

"Anne."

"I've got them."

"There's Ledford, and the two Craven girls, and—"

"Joyce. I've got them."

Joyce went up the corridor past the office in her coat. Talley was still behind the desk with the light off. Mrs.
Daughtry was not at the counter.

She came out the front doors into the cold at twenty past three
and the walk was empty and there were a hundred and some people
standing in the grass with their backs to her, all of them facing
the same way, down toward the bus drive.

---

She got down there at the outside of the crowd and could not see
past it, and she went along the edge of the lot between the cars
until she came up level with the drive.

The bus was in.

The children were boarding.

They went up the steps one at a time, and it took each of them a
while, because a child of seven cannot do steps and a stone at the
same time and they had to do it with the stone braced against the
step above and then get a knee under it.

No one helped them.

Vernon Basinger sat behind the wheel and did not turn his head.

Joyce could see the side of his face through the glass. He had
both hands on the wheel and he was looking out through the
windshield at the road, and there was a stone in the well of the
dash in front of him where a man keeps his route sheet, and his
eyes did not come off it for more than a second or two at a time.

Somebody in the crowd said his name.

Then somebody else said it, and then a man's voice, further back,
said something about him and Ruth Ann Cline together, and the
shape of it went through the crowd in about fifteen seconds, and
it got loud.

They had a thing to say now. They had been standing in the cold
for four hours with nothing to say and now they had it, and they
said it at the windshield of that bus.

Basinger did not look at them.

Cline got on last. She had to do the steps the way the children
had done them. The pocketbook swung and knocked against the rail.

The door folded shut.

The stop arm came in.

The bus pulled out of the drive and went down to the road and put
on its left signal and waited for a car to pass, and then it
turned onto the county road toward town.

---

The lot came apart behind it.

Joyce got into the Buick and got it started and got out into the
line, and the line was fifty or sixty vehicles long inside of two
minutes and none of it was going faster than the bus.

She had the heater going and it was blowing cold and she did not
touch it.

Ledwell's car was up ahead with the blue light going and no siren
and he was not passing the bus, he was riding along behind it at
its speed, and the sheriff's car was behind him.

The bus ran the route.

That was the thing Joyce could not get past, driving. It ran the
route. It went up the county road past the Esso and took the left
at the four-way, which was the first stop on that run, and it
slowed at the four-way the way a bus slows, and it did not stop,
and it went on.

It made the right onto Spencer Mill Road.

It went past the Wray place and past the trailer where the two
Hedrick children got on every morning, and it slowed there too.

Nobody got off.

It went on.

For about four miles it did everything a school bus does at the
end of a school day except let anybody off, and the whole line of
cars behind it did what cars do behind a school bus, which is
follow at that speed and not pass.

Then, a half mile short of where Spencer Mill Road bends back
toward town, the bus put on its right signal.

There was nothing there to turn into.

There was a cut in the bank where a field road went through a gap
in the fence line into the Sechrest bottom, which was forty acres
of cut-over corn ground that ran down toward the creek, and the
gate was standing open the way it had stood open every winter
Joyce had driven that road.

The bus turned in.

It went down the field road about eighty yards, slow, rocking on
the ruts, and it stopped in the middle of the stubble.

The stop arm came out.

---

Joyce got out of the car on the shoulder and stood at the fence.

It was twenty of four.

The cars came in behind her along both sides of the road, doors
opening, people getting out and coming up to the wire and standing
there. Some of them climbed the bank and some of them went through
the gap and got eight or ten feet into the field and stopped.

The children came off the bus.

They came down the steps the way they had gone up, doing it with
the stone first, and when they were down they walked out into the
stubble away from the bus.

Basinger came down last and he had his in his arms.

He walked out past the children and then he stopped and turned
around and stood.

---

They arranged themselves.

Joyce watched it happen and it took less than a minute and she
could not see anybody telling anybody where to go.

They made four rows.

Three rows of four and a short row of three at the back, with
about four feet between them and about four feet between the rows,
and Cline stood out in front of the first row facing them, and
Basinger stood behind the short row facing the same way Cline was
facing, which is the way you stand if you are the one at the back
of the room.

The rows were not straight. They were about as straight as a
second grade gets them.

The children put the stones down.

They did not set them out in any pattern. Each child put the stone
on the ground in front of where he was standing, the way you put a
thing down on a desk, and then straightened up and stood with his
arms at his sides.

Then nothing happened.

---

Joyce stood at the fence with both hands on the top wire.

The people around her had gone quiet again. Down the line
somebody was still calling a name at intervals, about every thirty
seconds, the same name.

At ten of four Bowman and Ledwell went through the gap and out
about forty feet and stopped, and Bowman called out to Cline
across the stubble, and then to the children, using their names,
which meant somebody had given him the roll.

He went through all fifteen.

Nothing.

He and Ledwell came back.

Joyce heard Bowman say something to Ledwell about the light.

Then there was a while when nothing was said at all.

Down the fence line the man was still calling the one name at
intervals, about every thirty seconds, and between them there was
the sound of the wire ticking where somebody further down had hold
of it, and an engine running somewhere back in the line of cars
where a man had not shut his off.

A truck came along the county road behind them and slowed at the
gap and went on, and the sound of it went away up toward the bend
and then there was not any sound of it.

The children stood in the stubble.

Joyce put her hands in her coat and took them out again.

---

At four o'clock the sun was off the field and on the pines at the
far side of it, and at ten past it was off the pines.

The temperature had been dropping since three.

Somebody down the fence line took a coat off and held it up and
said, to nobody, that they were going to have to do something
about the cold, and nobody answered him, and he stood there
holding the coat.

At twenty past four a man in a truck about six vehicles down
turned his headlights on and swung the truck around on the
shoulder so that the lights came through the gap and lay out
across the stubble.

Then the next one did it.

Then it went down the line both ways, a car at a time, thirty or
forty of them turning and backing and pulling up onto the bank to
get the angle, headlights coming on in twos all along the fence
until the whole of the Sechrest bottom was lit up white and flat
out to a hundred yards, with the frost coming up in it, and the
children standing in their rows in the middle of it with their
shadows going out long behind them.

Nobody went through the gap.

They stood at the wire with the lights of their own cars at their
backs and they looked at the field, and some of them had their
hands up on the top strand and some had hold of the post, and the
line of them ran a quarter mile in both directions along the road.

It was cold enough now that Joyce could see them breathing.

All of them, out in the light, every one, in and out, at the same
time.

 

~End~