Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
The first Sunday of December, I unlocked the doors of Zion Lutheran at eight o’clock, and the parking lot was white.
Nine inches had come in the night on a northwest wind, and not one tire track marked it. The snow lay smooth all the way out to Church Road, and the lard pail of sand by the front steps sat under its own little drift like a hat.
I stood on the top step with the key in my hand and could not make my feet go inside.
I am sixty-two years old. Old Mrs. Hagedorn put that ring in my palm the year her eyes got too poor for the keyhole and told me, “You are young and you are early, Janelle, and the Lord will do the rest.” In all the snowy Sundays since, I had never once looked out at a lot like that one.
Our lot holds about forty cars. It is blacktop, with a leaning light pole at the back and a flower bed along the east edge where the Altar Guild sets out petunias in May. On a snowy Sunday I would pull in at ten till eight, and the whole lot would already be scraped to the pavement, the snow laid up in a tidy windrow, and sand thrown on the steps thin and even, like somebody had been feeding chickens.
I had never seen the truck. Nobody had.
Behind me I heard my husband’s boots on the shoulder.
“Well,” Frank said. He stopped at the foot of the steps and looked out over the white. “Huh.”
“Huh is right.”
“First big one of the year. Maybe he’s running late.”
“He has never been late,” I said. “Not one time.”
Frank pushed his cap back. He ran the parts counter at the Case dealer in town until it closed, and he does not say “huh” about a machine lightly. He walked out into the lot, sank to his shin, and turned a slow circle.
“Then I’d best get the shovels from the furnace room.”
He went and got them. I stood there a minute longer. It felt the way it did when I was a girl and came down the stairs on Christmas morning to find the tree lights off. Some small thing I had never once thought about was gone, and it turned out to have been holding up the whole house.
I should tell you how it was before it stopped.
On every snowy Sunday anybody alive could remember, the lot was plowed. My mother used to say it was the one miracle she could point to without squinting. “Somebody with a truck,” my father would grunt, “who doesn’t care to be asked.” That was the family theory for decades, and it was about as far as anyone got.
Ardis Zimmer, who is ninety-four and has sat at the end of the pew under the east window, next to the radiator, since 1967, says the plowing began in the winter of 1972. No bill ever came. The church budget has a line for snow removal, and for fifty-four years that line has said “none.”
Everyone in Nordby has a story about the one time they tried to find out.
Elias Slettedahl’s was the most famous. In January of 1989 he parked his Oldsmobile in the corner of the lot on a Saturday night with a thermos, a wool blanket, and a pair of his son’s deer-hunting binoculars. He told it at every funeral lunch for fifteen years.