The House That Rolled Down the County Road

The second Saturday in October

The day came up bright and cold. There was frost on the stubble, and the sky over the Panhandle was that hard, clean blue you only get in October.

Arnie’s crew was there at six. By nine, they had rolled the trailer under the beams, let the jacks down, and chained everything tight. Our house sat up on that long trailer behind a big red truck with yellow lights flashing on top.

It looked smaller than I expected. And also bigger. I do not know how to explain that.

Jake rode up front in the escort pickup with Arnie’s nephew, an orange flag on the bumper and the light going. The co-op bucket truck went ahead of them. I stayed behind with Hailey and Cole to walk the first stretch along the road.

I did not expect anyone else to be there.

The whole road came.

The Petersons pulled up first, Mel and his wife, in their old Chevy with the dog in the back. Then the Kramers. Then the family from the Lutheran church who lived past the section line, with all four of their kids piled in the back seat to see.

By the time Arnie eased the truck out of our drive and onto the county road, there were nine pickups lined up behind the trailer with their hazards blinking. Two beet trucks headed for the piling ground in Hemingford pulled onto the shoulder to wait, and the drivers got out to watch.

Somebody’s grandma, a tiny woman in a quilted coat, came along the line with a thermos and a sleeve of paper cups and poured me coffee without asking.

“I saw one of these go down this road in 1971,” she said. “The old Swanson place. I was younger than your girl there.”

“My dad says he saw it too,” I said.

“Well, then he remembers it went fine.” She patted my arm. “This’ll go fine too, honey.”

Walking speed

Our house rolled down the county road at walking speed. I mean that exactly. Hailey and Cole and I walked beside it on the shoulder for the first quarter mile and kept pace without trying.

The gravel popped under the tires. The trailer creaked. Every so often the whole house rocked, just a little, and my heart went into my throat, and then it settled.

My kitchen curtains were still hanging in the window. Yellow, with little white flowers. Ruthann had helped me sew them the first winter. I watched them sway with every bump.

Cole kept his hand on the front of his coat like he was holding something in.

“Are the marks okay?” he whispered.

“The marks are fine,” I said. “Arnie’s the best there is.”

I put my own hand on my chest. I did not even know I was doing it until Hailey took a picture of me with her phone and showed me later.

The first power line went up and over like it was nothing. The co-op man in the bucket lifted it with a long fiberglass pole and Arnie crept under it. A cheer went up from the pickups behind us. Someone honked.

Then we came around the bend by the shelterbelt, and I saw the end of Gordon’s drive.

The end of the drive

He was standing there alone.

He had on his good hat, the gray felt one he wore to church and to funerals. He had on a clean pearl-snap shirt and his good jacket. Sixty-eight years old, hands at his sides, standing at the very end of his gravel drive where it met the county road.

He did not wave. He did not move. He watched the house come.

I stopped walking. Hailey stopped beside me. The pickups behind us slowed, and I could feel the whole road go quiet. Everybody on that road knew Gordon Rasmussen. Everybody knew whose ground that house had been sitting on.

Arnie’s truck crept past him. Then the front of the trailer. Then the porch, the porch Jake and Dad had built in one long weekend in July with the radio playing.

Gordon watched the porch go by.

Then he watched the kitchen window go by. The window by the table where he had sat in April with his coffee and his folded hands.

Hailey took my hand. She had not taken my hand in public since she was eight.

And then Gordon stepped down off his drive onto the gravel of the county road, and he lifted one hand toward Arnie’s cab.

Arnie hit the brakes.

The whole house rocked on the trailer and settled. Nobody on that road said a word.