I Wrote A Little Story

It begins like this: 

On a recent morning in early September, in a wood clapboarded house situated on a 40-acre farm just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12 and the younger is 9, and they arise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. Outside the boys’ bedroom window, the grass is dew-bent and lush, the leaves on the maples just starting to turn.

School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly: Faded and frayed thrift store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts affixed with knife sheaths. In each sheath, a fixed blade knife.

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the dense, ground level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour or so, a long yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the window glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water below. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some project or another: Tillering a long bow of beech or black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve carried back from the stream. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

Or here’s an alternate theory: Maybe the boys will pay the bus no heed because it’s passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they have never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gaze shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless minutes and interminable hours until release.

Maybe the boys in question are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Finlay and Rye, and maybe, if my wife Penny and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?

You can read the rest of it here.