Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

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  “Voral!” The voice scalded the air. She could raise it higher and higher until pigeons would take flight at the pop of the last syllable when she put it in earnest: “Vor-AL!”

  “What?” he said from the work bench. “What Louise?” She stuck her head into the confines of the stable turned to workshop, and the old dog looked up at her stout legs in shorts and apron and expanse of her sleeveless blue blouse and brown freckled arms and wagged his tail.

  “Chester boy’s here,” she said confidentially. “Your partner in crime.”

  Interesting choice of words, he thought, as he looked at her from the workbench and nodded: “Okay.”

  The first Tuesday went well and led to another. They got the pistons out and the rings that Munson had ordered came in by UPS in the late afternoon, so they also were in place. He washed the parts in the basement where there was an old cast-iron laundry sink while the boy fiddled with the bearing. Things went together smooth.

  So smooth that he decided to take Louise out to the Blue River-Juda game the following night. Triv obliged by throwing out a runner stealing third and chipping in with a bases-loaded, opposite-field single in the last of the ninth, producing the tying and the winning run.

  They knew Munson over here at Blue River. Several of the parents remembered. One even called him “Coach.” The sound settled nicely around him, like a mantel, soft and light on the shoulders.

  The following day school started and he found himself way behind. He was ready for class that first day, but the room itself was not organized. The microscopes were still locked in the closet and needed inspection before being set out at the lab tables in the back of the room. The gas was still off—he would have to get Wilkins, the janitor of twenty years, to get in the crawl space and throw the main valve. Posters, maps, vertebral skeletons were scattered in the far corners of the room: Munson was glad that Mr. Gladding usually avoided his room. It was at the far end of the hall, on the second floor. Even with the windows wide open, it would take the heat and hold it nicely on the unsufferable afternoons of waning summer, so the principal mostly stayed away. That left Munson to teach as best he could in the dense, sticky heat, hearing his own voice as a drone, sometimes wondering if he had energy to push the words across the thick spaces of the stifling room to the glazed eyes and flushed faces of his students.

  Tuesdays were the only change in the routine. And was this why he was always waiting for Tuesdays? It was nothing special, really. An old engine was being restored in the cool of the evenings.

  In the heat of those early afternoons, he stood before his pupils, showing off one of the skeletons, resurrected like Lazarus from the depths of the closet. Bones. He was good at discussing bones, pointing them out. Besides the skeletons, there were the bones, which he drew forth and lifted up into the light. The eyes followed his hands as he worked the articulations, showing off the left and right manus of amphibians, then passing the turtle and alligator manus to the students, the bones clicking away as they worked the joints.

  Clicking: in the heat of those early afternoons, why did the sounds of the bones always come to him as the ticking of a clock? He well knew there were not many years left for him in this job. Their own children were all grown up with one out to Kansas City and the other to Jefferson. And here he was in the midst of his bones, Voral Munson, finding himself waiting.