The Kesters

The Kester family lived on a dirt farm just off Millingtown Road in the southeast corner of our rural county. There were dozens of them, not dozens of farms, dozens of Kesters, or that was the way that it seemed when our school bus rumbled up to their stop each morning.

There they would be lined up in varying shapes and sizes by their rusted mailbox. None of them really looked alike, but they did share one thing in common. The rich aroma of cow manure, unbathed bodies, cigarette smoke, and dandruff flakes seeped out of their collective pores. There was another smell too. It was only later that I learned to identify that other smell as poverty. Deep, irrevocable, heartbreaking poverty.

They jostled and poked one another as the bus lumbered to a halt. Sometimes their laughter would reach through an open window. But, a quiet seemed to settle over them as the big mechanical arm swung the doors open. There was always a slight hesitation before the bravest one put their foot on the step. I say brave because as the first Kester head became visible over the seat something evil happened on that bus. Evil in a way that only others kids can be evil.

Instead of making room for the rough and tumble family, people slid to the end of their seats. People stared right through the Kesters as if they didn't exist when they tried to sit down. The Kesters sat with each other if there was an empty seat, but often they were left to walk up and down the aisle even after the bus started to move again. It must have been a living hell for them.

This blackballing of the Kesters went on for months. And, then one day, I watched Ginny and her sisters get on the bus. Their eyes said that they were tired of being pushed around. Their familiar smell was now mixed with something I had never sensed before. The heady scent of defiance rose to meet my nostrils that morning. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine them rising up like The Who singing:

We're Not Gonna Take It
no, We Ain't Gonna Take It
we're Not Gonna Take It Anymore

I was fascinated in that sick sort of that way we crane our necks to look at a rollover on the highway. I watched as first one and then another advanced down the aisle. Each planted her feet and took hold of a seat back. As the bus lurched forward, they shoved their hips sideways into the person who was denying them entrance. The plan was brilliant. People toppled in surprise to the right and the left, and the Kesters sat that day. No one could quite believe what happened, but a shift took place in that moment. And, they sat, as far as I can remember, every morning for the rest of the year.

Part of me cheered, and part of me was frightened by the overthrowing of accepted social order. You might ask me, where were you in all of this? Was I defending the rights of the downtrodden? Was I advocating for the disadvantaged?

No. I sat in the seat furthest back with my friend, Brenda. On the left. By the emergency door. It was seldom that the Kesters ventured that far back. I wish I could say that I would have shown kindness, but I know that on the days that I was alone in that seat, I prayed that none of them would sit with me. I never spoke up. I looked away like everyone else when it was too awkward to watch. Don't even ask me, " WWJD?"

Anyway, I dreamed about them a while ago. The Kesters. As they were then, not as the adults I am sure they have become. I dreamed that I went to their house and walked in through the unlocked door. No one was home, but I saw stacks and stacks of clean laundry piled everywhere. Folded. Meticulous. Fresh. Pristine.

I marveled as one does in a dream at the randomness of finding such order in a place where I expected chaos. I admired the mother who kept track of so many kids. I looked at a table set with paper plates and plastic forks. The pot in the middle held some sort of soup. There was a piano in the corner with a Thompson music book opened to Minuet in Somethingerother. No carpet covered the floor, but the wide boards were swept clean. When I heard them arriving home, I tried to get out of the house as fast as I could. In my haste to get out the backdoor before they came in the front, I knocked over all the laundry. I wept to think that their laundry was soiled by my careless exit.

Who knows what dreams mean. What parts of the past will come boiling to the surface while we sleep. And why.

Maybe it is good for me to remember how I learned the lessons I hold dear today. Maybe it is good for me to remember when I was afraid to be different even if "being different" only meant being kind to someone who the rest of the world deemed unworthy.

Maybe I just ate too much chocolate before I fell asleep, but it gave me something to think about.