Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
“Tell him I’ll take care of it,” Frank said. “If he’ll let me borrow it.”
He let him. Lyle sent the key by way of Ardis, taped inside a Christmas card.
Frank told me about the place that night over the supper he was too wound up to eat. The farmhouse was clean as a board and nearly bare. There was a recliner, a clock, a table with one chair pulled out. In the machine shed, under a tarp, sat a 1966 Ford F-250, dark green where the paint still held, with a Western mount on the front bumper and an amber beacon on the cab roof. The cutting edge had been replaced in the last year or two, not by him. It had come from a farm-and-ranch store two counties over, he said, and the box was still on the shelf.
“That’s where he bought them,” Frank said. “Two counties over. Clear out of my way.” He shook his head. “He’d have driven to Montana to keep me from knowing.”
It snowed that Friday night, three inches of dry stuff. Frank went out to the shed at three. Elliott Vickers was already waiting at our back door in his father’s barn coat.
“Mr. Vance, I figured you might need a hand.”
Elliott had spent the autumn in Frank’s garage learning to rebuild carburetors, and Frank had been looking for a way to stop pretending he did not like the boy.
At six I drove over to the church with a thermos. The lot was scraped to the blacktop, the windrow laid soft against the flower bed. One corner by the light pole was sloppy, like a child’s coloring. Frank stood by the old green Ford with his arm around Elliott’s shoulders. “Too thick on the third step,” he was saying. “We’ll get it.”
The congregation kept its promise, which was not easy, because we are Lutherans in North Dakota and we say thank you the way other people breathe. For three weeks no one said it. Pastor Tim drove out to the farm once, on his own, without a hotdish and without a speech, and sat in the kitchen for forty minutes. When he came back to the church he said only, “He makes a decent cup of coffee. He asked whether the furnace was holding.”
After Christmas, Pastor Tim asked Lyle, as simply as he might ask a neighbor to supper, whether he’d care to come on a Sunday. Lyle said he’d think on it. He thought on it for two Sundays.
It was the second Sunday of January, and eight inches had come out of the northwest in the night. Frank and Elliott went out at three. At seven, the phone rang, and it was Dwight Mohr.
“I’ve got him,” Dwight said. “In the car. We’ll be there at a quarter to eight. He asked me to ask if Janelle would be at the doors. He said you’d know to come early.”
I stood on the steps in the cold bright morning with the key in my hand. The lot was plowed to the blacktop. Sand was thrown on the steps, a little thinner than it had been. At the far edge, the amber light turned slowly, and Elliott sat in the cab with his arm out the window, grinning like a boy handed the keys to a locomotive.