The Farmall That Plowed Us to Town

Somebody put a hand on my back. When I looked up, it was Trent, crouched beside me with his cap in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Marlene.”

I was not ready to answer him. I put my hand over his for a second, and then I took it back.

The line crew got our power back on at nine that night. Trent plowed our road again on his way home in the dark, all four miles, both directions, wide as a highway.

He plowed our yard, too. When we got home, the drive was scraped clean to the gravel and the snow was piled up neat beside the corn crib, under that red and white sign.

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Lyle came the next day.

I knew it was him by the way he drove, careful and too slow. He parked by the house and sat in the truck a long while with the engine running.

When he got out, he lifted two green oxygen tanks out of the passenger side, one under each arm. Full. I could tell by the way he carried them.

He came up the back steps and knocked, which he had never done in his life. Lyle had always just walked in.

“Marlene,” he said.

“Lyle.”

“I drove over to Spencer this morning. To the supply place.” He held up the tanks a little. “They said they’d be out tomorrow with the rest. I didn’t want to wait on them.”

I let him in. He set the tanks in the corner by the closet, side by side, the way the delivery man did. Then he stood in my kitchen with his hat in his hands, the same way his son had stood in the snow.

Gene was in the recliner with the machine humming again. He looked at his brother and did not say anything.

“I said it,” Lyle said. “At the café, the Saturday before the storm. I said Marlene’s road can wait till she learns how to vote. I said it to be funny. Trent was there.”

He swallowed. “I didn’t know he’d take it serious. And I didn’t know you were on oxygen, Gene. I didn’t know because I didn’t come at Christmas. I didn’t come because I was sore about forty-one votes.”

He looked at me then. “Twelve years on that board, and my own brother’s wife puts up a sign for the man who beat me. I thought you did it to shame me. I let it eat at me.”

“I didn’t do it to shame you, Lyle,” I said. “I did it because of the Hanson girl on the school bus.”

“I know that now. Dale told me, after.” He shook his head. “I should have fixed that bridge. I kept saying there wasn’t money. I should have found some.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The coffee pot ticked.

“Trent went to the shop foreman yesterday when he got back,” Lyle said. “Told Rich the whole thing himself. Rich gave him three days without pay and wrote it up in his file.”

“I didn’t ask for that,” I said.