Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
“Sit down, please,” Lyle Engstrom said. “Ardis tells me you drove her.”
“My husband did the driving.”
“Then he can be thanked for that, and you’ll forgive me for doing it.” He gave the smallest dry nod. “That one I’ll allow. That’s a hospital and not the church.”
Ardis sat beside him in her chair, her knees nearly touching his. She had taken off her gloves. Her eyes were red, and she had not wiped them, and she gave me a look that said, plainly: not a word from you.
“I asked Lyle,” she said, “whether I might tell you why, or whether he would rather say it himself. He would rather say it himself.”
“I would,” Lyle said. “I’ve said it to nobody. I find I’d like to try it out loud once, before I’m dead. It’s a thing a man ought to say to a stranger first.” He folded his hands. “Pardon me if it comes out in the wrong order.”
“I was twenty-four,” he said. “Marnie was twenty-three. We’d been married two years, in the little rental house next to Ardis’s on Third Street, a mile from the church. I farmed with my dad, three miles out, and in town I was on the church council, which I didn’t want, but they’d asked. That winter Elias’s back went out and they asked who’d tend the front steps: sand, scrape, keep the walk clear. I said I would. I said it in front of the whole council. I said, ‘Leave it to me.'”
He looked at the window.
“First Saturday in February. A first-calf heifer started at supper and it went wrong. Backward. I had Marnie holding the lantern, because my dad’s hip was no good, and we were in that barn till past five in the morning. Pulled the calf alive. She was sitting on a bale with the lantern in her lap, and she laughed at me because I was holding the calf and crying. Not that kind of crying. The kind a man does from being up all night.” He cleared his throat. “She made me an egg when we got in. I sat down at the kitchen table to pull my boots off. That’s all I remember.”
The radiator knocked in the wall.
“A freezing rain had come on after midnight and glazed everything. The steps would have been glass. I had told myself I’d get down there by six to scrape them. I woke up at twenty after eight. I woke because Ardis was in the kitchen, and I knew from her face.”
I did not look at Ardis. I could feel her not looking at me.
“Marnie walked down alone. She went in her blue coat, with a pan of rolls for the youth breakfast. She went up the front steps at about half past seven. The top step was the worst of them. She went down backwards and hit her head on the stone edge of the stoop. She sat up and laughed at herself, I’m told, and said she was fine. A few minutes later she stopped talking. She died on the Wednesday in that very hospital, three floors down from where I’m sitting.”
He spoke it all in the same level voice, like a man reading numbers off a scale.