The Lane I Cut Around My Brother’s Gate

Ten O’Clock

Mike’s mother brought the kids out at ten, with sandwiches and a cooler and a gallon of lemonade. Lily ran straight to me. Gus ran straight to the dozer.

“You stay off that,” I told him.

“Can I sit in it if it’s off?”

“Later,” I said. “When the trucks are done.”

Lily stood on the new gravel in her pink sneakers and turned all the way around. She looked west down the lane toward the road, and east toward the gate.

“Is this ours?” she said.

“It’s ours.”

“Is Uncle Kurt mad at us?”

I knelt down on the gravel in front of her.

“I don’t think he’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s worried about money, and he made a bad choice about it. Grown-ups do that.”

“Are you mad at him?”

I thought about lying. I did not.

“A little,” I said. “But he’s still your uncle, and he still held the back of my coat on Grandpa’s tractor when I was smaller than you. I don’t forget that just because of a gate.”

She looked at me a long time with Mike’s eyes. Then she went and got cups for the men.

The Last Truck

Ten loads. Eleven. Twelve.

At eleven fifteen, Jeff tipped the thirteenth load near the road end, by the culvert, and Walt walked out and checked the crown with his boot and said, “One more ought to finish it.”

We were short at the house end. The first loads had settled into the clay overnight, the way fresh cut ground does. There was a rough stretch maybe sixty feet long near my yard where the dozer had dug in deep on my first bad pass, and the gravel there was thin.

Gus had been allowed to sit in the dozer cab, engine off, and was steering it with great seriousness.

At twenty to twelve, I saw Pastor Dale’s truck coming west on the county road. An old tandem, high on the springs, loaded heavy.

He turned in over the culvert, slow. He backed it all the way down the lane, almost to the yard, with Walt walking beside him calling the turns.

He tipped it right on the rough stretch, and the gravel came off his bed in one long slide and lay there in a heap almost to my knees.

Pastor Dale climbed down out of the cab. He had a rake of his own. He set it against the truck and came over and shook my hand, gloves and all.

“Fourteen,” he said.

“Fourteen,” I said.

The men started on the heap with their shovels. I went at it with Dad’s rake. It was more than a rake could handle. It wanted a blade, and the dozer was too big for that last tight stretch by the yard.

That was when I heard a tractor start in Kurt’s yard.