The church bus rolled up Spring Street in Jeffersonville with forty two seniors aboard, singing, and I kept my eyes on the mirror. I am Floyd Babcock, sixty seven years old, who has driven the white bus of Grace Fellowship for nineteen years. In the third seat behind me sat Velma Strickland, seventy nine, with her purse on her lap and her face turned to the window. The night before, she had told me in a whisper that her son was emptying her house, and that one million, four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in old coins and the deed to her farm were hidden where he would never look.
Then, from the front seat, the voice of the wife of the pastor rose cheerfully over the singing. Mrs. Marla Whitcomb, a handsome woman in a lavender suit, leaned across the aisle toward Velma and said, in a voice that carried to the back of the bus, “Velma, dear, I know where you hid it. Your son told me. We can go there together after the tour, and I will keep it safe for you.” The singing stopped. Velma went rigid, and her knuckles whitened on the clasp of her purse.
I understood in an instant. The son of Velma, Dwayne, forty eight years old, had been taking pills for six years, and had been selling the furniture of his mother piece by piece. He had not found the coins. But he had apparently found a friend in the wife of the pastor, who had her own debts, and who had lately taken a sudden interest in the elderly and their savings. Marla smiled at Velma sweetly, and I saw that the smile did not reach her eyes. I eased the bus to the curb in front of the office of the sheriff.
A church bus rolling through town with forty two seniors aboard gave one driver the morning to bring a widow and her son home in Jeffersonville.
I gave my terms to the bus, in the voice I used to use at the end of a long trip. “Folks, we are going to sit here for a minute. Mrs. Whitcomb, you are going to stay in your seat. Velma, you are going to tell us, if you wish, what you have told me. And everyone else on this bus is going to keep singing, because there are forty two of us and one of her, and I believe the Lord counts that as a majority.” Somebody in the back began the second verse. Slowly, the others joined.
Velma looked at me. Then she turned in her seat and patted the vinyl beside her. “Floyd,” she said, “I will tell you where it is. It is under your bus.” She pointed down. Beneath the floor of the church bus, in the compartment for the spare tire, she had hidden a coffee can with the coins and the deed, three months earlier, with the help of the old mechanic of her late husband Orville. Nobody would ever have looked there. I felt my eyes sting. In nineteen years I had never once opened that compartment.
Marla Whitcomb sprang to her feet. She understood now what was beneath her, and she lunged down the aisle toward the front door, pushing at the folding handle, intending to leap from the bus and crawl underneath. Seventy eight year old Mr. Pettijohn, from the fifth row, stuck out his cane across the aisle. She tripped. She went down hard on the rubber floor, with her lavender skirt around her knees, and four ladies in hats leaned out of their seats and held her down with their pocketbooks.
The sheriff came out of the building with two deputies, because I had pressed the horn. I opened the compartment myself, on my knees on the pavement, with the seniors leaning from the windows above. The coffee can was there, rusted, wrapped in a feed sack. The coins glittered in the sun. Dwayne arrived two minutes later in the car of his mother, haggard and shaking, having been called by Marla, and when he saw the bus and the deputies and the coffee can, he sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands.
The money consequences were gentle. Marla Whitcomb was charged with conspiracy and exploitation of an elder and resigned her position at the church. Dwayne, offered a choice by the judge, chose a treatment program in Louisville, and Velma paid. The coins and the deed went into a bank vault and a family trust, one million, four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in all. The farm stayed in the name of Velma. The church bus stayed on the road, with a new brass plate screwed to the compartment door.
In the name of her husband Orville, who passed in 2016, Velma started the Orville Strickland Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for treatment beds, elder legal help and transportation for seniors who cannot drive, in Clark, Floyd and Harrison counties. In the first year the fund gave nine thousand rides and placed twenty six people in treatment. One was a ninety year old from Charlestown who had not left her house in two years. She rode the white bus to the fair and ate a funnel cake.
On a Sunday in the fall, Dwayne, fourteen months clean, stood in the doorway of the church bus in a pressed shirt, holding out a hand to help his mother up the steps. Velma took it. She settled into the third seat, with her purse on her lap, and looked out the window. The singing began in the back. I put the bus in gear and glanced in the mirror, and she was smiling. “Floyd,” she called, “do not forget to check the spare tire.” I laughed until I nearly missed the turn. The seniors cheered all the way down Spring Street, and I turned the bus toward the river, where the sun was coming down gold on the water, and thought there was no better road in all of Indiana.
