The Lane I Cut Around My Brother’s Gate

Friday

The dozer came on a lowboy at noon on Friday. The driver unloaded it at the county road where Dad’s stakes would begin and showed me where the fuel shutoff was.

“You run one of these before?” he asked.

“Dad had an old Cat for terracing when I was a kid,” I said. “I ran it every summer from twelve on.”

He looked at me a second, then nodded and climbed back in his truck. “Blade’s touchy on the tilt,” he said out the window. “Go easy.”

I had already pulled the stakes out of the bundle that morning and set them myself, one every forty or fifty feet, along my side of the line, straight west from my yard to the road. Dad’s line. I used his tape.

I finished my afternoon route at four. Mike’s mother picked the kids up from the bus barn and took them to her house in town for supper, so they would not be anywhere near the machine.

Then I climbed up on that dozer in my old barn coat and started at the road.

The first pass was ugly. I took too much with the blade and dug a hole the size of a bathtub. I backed up, filled it, and started again, slower. By the fourth pass my hands remembered.

You strip the sod first, push it off to the side for a berm. Then you cut down to the clay, crown the middle so water runs off, and pull a shallow ditch on each side. Dad taught me that in the terrace years. I could hear him saying it.

Mike got home from the shop at five and came straight out to the road ditch in his work clothes. Ron Stiles had dropped off the culvert that afternoon, twenty four feet of corrugated steel pipe.

Mike set it by hand with a shovel and a level and the tractor from our shed, an old Deere with a loader that had been Dad’s. He dug the bed, set the pipe low on the uphill end like Ron said, and packed it.

He worked until his headlamp batteries went dim. He had to be at the shop at six the next morning for a Saturday shift, rebuilding a feedlot’s mixer wagon, and he went anyway. Mike does not miss a shift.

“Wake me if you need me,” he said, at eleven, and kissed the top of my head and went inside.

I kept going. The rental dozer had good lights. I cut west along Dad’s stakes, one at a time, and pulled each stake as I came to it and laid it in the cab beside me.

Around nine, Kurt’s yard light came on. I saw it over my shoulder, the big sodium lamp on the pole by his shed. I saw his kitchen light, too.

He did not come out. I did not expect him to.

At one in the morning, I had the lane roughed in all the way to my yard. I shut the dozer down, climbed off, and stood in the dark with my legs shaking.

Thirteen hundred and twenty feet of raw, crowned clay, running west in the starlight. It smelled like turned ground. I could hear frogs in the road ditch.

I counted the stakes in the cab. Thirty one. I carried them inside and laid them on the table, and I slept four hours in my clothes.