The school was half a mile away from the farm. Both were over ten miles from the nearest town, which only had about 200 people in it. My grandparents' neighbors around the farm were mostly their age, so we rarely saw any other children when we visited them. We never imagined that we would see an ice cream truck anywhere in the area, but we did.
First we heard the music. We stopped our swinging and running to listen to it. We laughed and guessed that someone probably had a car horn that sounded like an ice cream truck, and we ran toward the road to see who it was. A cloud of dust settled around the truck as it stopped near us. The driver looked tired, thirsty, and somewhat unhappy.
We stared at the driver, and he at us, until my cousin Kinglew—the only one of us who had any money with him—stepped forward. He asked, "How much for an ice cream cone?" The price was right, so Kinglew bought each of us a cone. After the driver had given all six of us our ice cream, he made a cone for himself. We stood in the shade of the truck, eating ice cream, while the driver asked us about the area.
We found out that someone had told the driver about Petersburg, which he thought was a good-sized town, but which turned out to be a nothing more than a meeting hall, a school, and some visiting grandchildren. The driver found out that he was unlikely to find any more customers in the area, that he was a mile away from the paved road that would take him back to the small town, and that he was very lucky to have seen any person at all.
We waved as the ice cream truck drove away, and I started to think about how long that man could have been driving around looking for the town of Petersburg. I learned that day that sometimes it is an adult that needs help, and sometimes it is children who can give it.