Growing up in rural Louisiana, we kids always rode the bus to school. Each morning we rode for almost an hour, and each afternoon we reversed our route and rode back home. Since my siblings and I were some of the first ones to get on, we had to get around pretty early. Part of the year it was still dark when we boarded the bus.
In the early days, we rode a short old bus owned and driven by Mr. Hale Malone. Mr. Hale was a farmer who raised cows and, although small in frame, he was a no-nonsense fellow who expected the children on his bus to behave. I have seen him stop and put older boys off his bus when they refused to obey him. In such cases, Mr. Hale didn't seem to concern himself too much with how those boys would get home.
Mr. Hale was not what you would call a cheerful person nor was there any semblance of patience in his demeanor. Mostly, it was Mr. Hale's way or the highway. Because of this, the younger children were all in awe of him and so were never disruptive on his bus. With the older children though, or at least the boys, liberties tended to be taken that would stretch Mr. Hale's patience, often to the breaking point. Then all bets were off. At the very least, the offender would get a good tongue lashing and sometimes things would escalate to where the culprit would find himself walking the rest of the way home. It happened.
I have many memories of riding Mr. Hale's bus, but one memory that stands out to me is when I was in the second grade and we were headed home from school one day. School bus etiquette (everywhere and at all times) demands that the older boys sit in the back and, to some extent anyway, control who else sits back there with them. Well, for some reason which I can no longer recall, I was sitting by myself on the next to last seat. Directly across the aisle from me sat the oldest boy on the bus. His name was Leonard Miller. Leonard was an ugly boy with greasy hair which he tried to comb back like Elvis Presley, but I'm here to tell you that I knew Elvis from the movies and I knew Elvis from his pinup posters and Leonard was no Elvis.
Leonard was creepy and unpopular and mean to the other children on the bus. In fact, the entire Miller family was lowdown, mean-spirited, and disliked by the whole community. They just did things differently than other folks. For instance, Leonard and his brothers Billy and Johnny had snuck through the woods to our backyard one night and shot our pet rabbits where they lived in a pen. When confronted by my dad, they said they were hunting lightning bugs and didn't realize they had shot our rabbits. These boys lived with their mother and were something of a terror to the neighborhood.
So here I was sitting directly across from Leonard Miller on the way home from school and I was minding my Ps and Qs, I can tell you that. But I wouldn't have had to, because Leonard was obviously off his beam. He was sick, and I mean really sick. He was trying his best to lay prone with his feet stretched way out in front of him, his body slumped down in the seat, and his head tilted back so that his face pointed toward the ceiling. He kept saying to the rest of us, "Would y'all just shut up! I'm not feeling good." Then he would groan horribly and say something like, "Would all of y'all just be quiet for a minute? I'm sick, I tell you!"
All of a sudden Leonard sat up and threw up all over the seat in front of him, occupants included. He also puked right down the middle of the aisle. Luckily for me, he stopped before he got to my side of the bus. For a moment pandemonium broke out in the back of the bus. A couple of the flightier girls screamed out loud. I may have screamed once or twice myself, I don't remember, but it was that bad, you see. In spite of all the commotion, though, Mr. Hale remained uncharacteristically calm. He just kept on driving.
Now I will digress for a minute as you contemplate this horrific scene by telling you that Louisiana, and I suppose it had something to do with its French Catholic heritage, was the first state in the union to serve hot lunches in the public school system. On that particular day, we had been served mixed vegetables, in the form of peas and carrots, along with what we (not) affectionately called, "Monkey Meat." This was a breaded piece of what was supposed to be beef but was shapeless enough and tasteless enough and non-descript enough it could just as well have been anything from alligator to baboon.
I reckon if any of us children riding Mr. Hale's bus that day had forgotten what we had for lunch, we were now provided with a stark reminder of it as whole English peas and bits of carrot rolled down the aisle as the bus headed down a long decline (I won't mention the Monkey Meat -- just let your mind wander). I think some of the peas actually bounced off the back of Mr. Hale's seat as he sat, unperturbed for once, possibly contemplating his sins or the state of his cows back home. But the peas and carrots did not stay there long as the bus now headed up a rather steep hill. As the angle of the bus reversed itself, they all came rushing back up the aisle to where Leonard still sat. With his head lolling to one side, and with a bit of carrot resting precariously on his chin, Leonard continued to beg us to, "shut up, can't y'all see I'm sick?"
I don't know who cleaned up the mess on Mr. Hale's bus that day, but I'm guessing Leonard Miller did because that's just the way Mr. Hale was back then.
Sam Byrnes is a Gentry-area resident and regular contributor to the Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.