The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

Then came this Christmas Eve.

I want you to picture Gopher Flats the way it actually is, not the way the calendar makes December look. We are two thousand people, a grain elevator, a Baptist church and a Methodist church that trade off hosting the blood drive, a VFW hall with a leaky roof fund that never quite fills up, and a highway, Route KK, that connects us to the interstate the way a garden hose connects to a faucet. On a normal Christmas Eve that highway carries families heading to grandmothers’ houses, a few truckers hauling last-minute freight, and Odell Rasmussen’s flatbed loaded with cut Christmas trees he sells out of the church parking lot. On this particular Christmas Eve, the weather service missed the mark by about ten degrees and six inches, and Route KK turned into a parking lot of its own, cars sliding into the ditches on both sides faster than anybody could warn the next one coming.

I had the diner open till three that day, same as every Christmas Eve, mostly for the men who didn’t want to sit home yet and the two or three families who’d rather eat my chicken and dumplings than start their own turkey. By two the snow was coming sideways. By two thirty my dishwasher Petra’s husband called to say the road out to their place was already drifted shut, and I sent her home before it got worse. By three I was alone in the Corner Griddle with a pot of coffee, a radio playing carols nobody was listening to, and a bad feeling in my stomach.

The bad feeling turned out to be right. At quarter past three my phone rang and it was Gid Strayhorn, which had not happened in nineteen years.