Steve and Bobby

". . . to go beyond is as wrong as to fall short."
Confucius

He was climbing down out of a loggers truck when I first saw him.  I was later to learn that he got to school every day by hitchhiking in to town from his home in a small farm community on the western edge of the hills.  Cache Valley consisted mainly of a half dozen large farm families, a one room school, and a Missionary Baptist church.  It was a farm community that tractors had yet to invade; "horsepower" meant something other than the size of a gasoline engine.

Daylight was just breaking and the truck's headlights still brightened the street in front of one of the two "general" stores in the village.  Pollard, at that time, was a busy farm village, boasting of two stores, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop and an auto repair shop.  The railroad still existed, although it's primary reason for still being was to transport the bales of cotton from the cotton gin to market. We had our own doctor and two service stations, one on either end of town, just an easy rifle shot apart.

Steve seemed a little tentative as he crossed the street, glancing back at the truck's dim illumination. which revealed his jeans, faded but clean and the nondescript short sleeved shirt that he wore.  He was about five foot six and was a bit chubby.  Not obese, but still carrying some of his "baby fat" in the demeanor of a well fed teenage farm kid.  Weighed maybe 190. He carried  neither lunchbox or books, and stood a little off to the side of the small group waiting for the decrepit old bus for transport to the high school in the manner of one who wanted to fit in but lacked the skills to do so. The modified pickup truck bringing a half dozen or so kids from the flatland communities to the north had just unloaded it's cargo, so, in total, there were perhaps fifteen or twenty passengers for the aging vehicle.
 
It was in the shortening days of early December, 1947. The bus, of faded vintage at least ten years prior, finally made its noisy arrival, "Tadpole", a 260 pound senior guard on the school championship football team, at the controls.  His years of handling farm vehicles qualified his skills and his size and demeanor assured his position; he took no crap.  The bus was not terribly old in terms of mileage, but ten years of gravel roads had taken their toll.  It had four seats, benches actually, each running the full length of the bus.  Already seated on the rightmost bench nearest the front door was a smallish, middle-aged lady who we knew only as "Miss Hazel".  She was a teacher at the elementary school in the county seat.

Miss Hazel lived with her widowed mother on the family farm a couple of miles west of town. They made no attempt to farm the eighty or so acres, but lived off their small garden, the rent from the tillable land and, of course, Miss Hazel.'s salary, meager though it was.  She routinely parked her 60 hp, faded blue prewar Ford sedan in the village near the bus garage and rode the bus to her job, a gas and money saving habit no doubt derived from the wartime days of gas rationing.

The bus was quickly loaded and grumbled its way out of town and began its gravelly progress eastward on US 62 toward school.

There was never any dozing since sudden stops often cause the passengers to slide forward on their bench. We had to stay somewhat alert and anticipate the stops.  One of these stops precipitated an idea in the mind of one of the passengers.  Bobby Brower, a couple of years older than Steve, was an overly mischievous second child of a sometimes Baptist preacher and was living validity of the generally accepted  axiom  "preachers' kids are the orneriest". Bobby circulated among the rearmost passengers, mainly male, suggesting that, on the next stop, they should all push a little harder in their sliding forward.  This  proposal was directed especially to those seated on the bench upon which Miss Hazel sat.  Some were even recruited from the other three benches and persuaded to change their seating so as to be in position to add to the effort.  Steve, being relatively new to the group and wanting badly to "fit in" went along with the plan.  What harm could a little push like that do?  He had misjudged both the force that could be generated and the damage it could do, or maybe he just wasn't thinking at all. 

He was, however, about to learn  something about people

When the time came and the bus brakes provided the opportunity for the inertia to cause the bodies to press forward on the seat, Bobby took a running start from the rear of the bus and slammed himself into the mass of sliding students in an effort to exert the maximum amount of available force on the teacher.  His real motivation remains a mystery.

She didn't exactly scream, it was sort of a huge exhaling, a grunt and a rather large whimper.

The bus stopped.
 
She sobbed.

There was a silence punctuated only by the erratically idling motor.

Tadpole took in the scene; he had caught the unusual movement in his interior mirror, even though his attention had been on the road and the reason for the sudden stop.

Bobby, standing now in the rear, started a laugh and stopped abruptly when no one joined in.  His grin deteriorated to a sheepish grin.

Tadpole's gaze would have frozen tap water.  "You'll stay on the bus with me", he said and sat back down behind the wheel. 

Bobby's grin evaporated.

Steve tried to become invisible.

As everyone but Bobby unloaded at the school's double front doors, Tadpole collared me, "Go fetch Mister Thorndike", he growled.  I stared at him.  "MOVE!", he said.  I did.

We heard later that Miss Hazel had been taken to the local hospital, examined, and given a good supply of aspirin and taken home.  She was hurt, battered and bruised, but thankfully, no bones were broken and no internal injuries noted.

She lost several days' work.
 
Bobby was seen being escorted into the superintendent's office, and later leaving by the rear door of the auditorium as Mr. T held the door open.  We assumed that the incident was duly reported and thoroughly investigated; Bobby was not seen in school for a few weeks.  Steve was identified as one of the perpetrators. 

It would be a wonderful ending if we could say that Steve learned a valuable lesson here which went on the guide him the rest of his life, but, alas, if this was true, it was not apparent to anyone at the time.  He was simply terrified.  Having come from a one-room farm country school where punishment had been doled out with switches, paddles and/or belts and an assault on a teacher was considered an act on par with that of a traitor in wartime, and having just recently been through the school's customary subjecting of freshmen boys to a gauntlet of belt wielding upper classmen known as the "belt line", he had no clue as to what might be his fate. 

He went into low profile, fearfully awaiting a sentencing. but mercifully suffered no further attention over the matter. It was not discussed.

But no one recalls Bobby's ever being a passenger on the bus again, and, other than a subsequent firearms "accident" in which another student gained a flesh wound in a leg, was not much about him was seen or heard.

And no one remembers whether or not he completed high school.