The Morning the School Bus Didn’t Come

Thirty-Eight Years on Route 31

Odessa Greer had driven Route 31 for thirty-eight years. She had started in the fall of 1987, when she was thirty years old, a newly divorced mother of two who needed a job with hours that matched her children’s. She had meant to do it for a year or two. Then she got to know the children on her route, and the year or two turned into five, and then ten, and then she stopped counting.

She knew every child who had ever ridden her bus. Not just their names. She knew who got carsick and had to sit up front. She knew who was allergic to peanuts, which in a county that grew more peanuts than almost anywhere in Georgia was no small thing. She knew whose daddy was in prison and whose mama was sick and whose grandmother was raising them and whose house had no heat in January. She kept a roll of peppermints in her cardigan pocket and a box of granola bars under her seat, and she never asked any child why they were hungry. She just handed them a granola bar and told them to sit down and hush.

She had rules. No standing while the bus was moving. No cussing. No meanness. If you were mean to another child on Odessa Greer’s bus, you sat in the front seat directly behind her for two weeks and helped her count heads at every stop, and by the end of the two weeks you were usually not mean anymore. Over thirty-eight years, four of the meanest boys in Tallow Creek had done time in that front seat. One of them was now the sheriff.

She had never once been in an accident. She had never once lost a child. She had never once left a child standing at a stop.

Until that Monday.

The previous Friday afternoon, after she dropped off her last rider and parked the bus in the county lot, a woman from the district transportation office had been waiting for her by the time clock. The woman was young and wore a lanyard and looked very uncomfortable. She handed Odessa an envelope and said she was sorry, she was just the messenger.

Odessa read the letter standing in the parking lot. It said that, as part of a district-wide efficiency plan, the Tallow Creek County School District was consolidating its rural bus routes. Route 31 had been identified as a low-ridership route. Effective Monday, it would be discontinued. Students who had ridden Route 31 would now be served by a consolidated stop at the intersection of Persimmon Road and U.S. Highway 280. Families had been notified by mail. Mrs. Greer’s position would be eliminated. She would receive her accrued retirement benefits and the district’s sincere thanks for her many years of service.

“Low ridership,” Odessa said out loud.

“I’m sorry?” said the woman with the lanyard.

“Twenty-two children,” Odessa said. “I have twenty-two children on that route. Who told them it was low?”

The woman did not know. She said the numbers came from a consultant. She said the decision had been approved by the superintendent. She said again that she was sorry. Then she went back inside.

Odessa had sat in her car in the county lot for an hour. She thought about the consolidated stop at Persimmon and Highway 280. She knew that intersection. Everyone in the county knew it. It was a four-lane highway with no shoulder, no sidewalk, and no traffic light, and every morning between six and eight o’clock, it was thick with logging trucks headed to the paper mill, sixty and seventy miles an hour, loaded with pine. For the children at the end of Persimmon Road, it was a four-mile walk. For the children out by the river, it was nine.

And the letters. Families had been notified by mail. Odessa knew how mail worked on Route 31. Half the mailboxes were on posts leaning into the ditch. Some families shared a box. Some had moved and never changed their address. Some of the parents could not read English. She would have bet her pension that more than half the families on her route had no idea what was coming on Monday.

She went home and did not sleep. At four o’clock on Monday morning, she was sitting at her kitchen table in her robe, staring at the clock on the stove. At 4:30, she got up and got dressed in her Sunday clothes, because she did not know what else to wear. At 4:45, she called her pastor.

“Reverend,” she said, when he finally answered, groggy and alarmed. “I’m sorry to wake you. I need the keys to the church van.”