The Road I Plowed for My Brother in Law

We had two electric space heaters. I put both in Hank’s room and shut the door.

The trouble with an old farmhouse is it leaks heat the way a screen door leaks flies, and two little heaters on one old circuit are a joke against twenty below and a wind that finds every window frame.

Kirsten bought a thermometer for the nursery the week we came home from the hospital, one of those little digital ones.

At midnight it read 61. At half past twelve it read 57. At one o’clock it read 52, and it was still going down.

A grown man can stand a cold house. A three-week-old can’t. The nurse had told us babies that small can’t hold their own heat yet.

Kirsten had that sentence in her head, and I had it in mine, and neither of us said it out loud.

“We have to go somewhere,” Kirsten said. She was holding Hank against her skin inside her flannel shirt, and his little feet were in my wool socks, pulled up to his knees.

The only place within reach was her brother’s. Darrell Moe farmed two miles east of us on the same road, between us and the blacktop.

He was 40, a cattle man with a hundred and some cows and a few quarters of wheat.

His wife, Lori, was 38. Their house had a coal stove in the basement and a furnace upstairs, and you could have hung meat in our kitchen and sweated in theirs.

Town was ten miles. The fire station would be open, but in the dark, in that wind, I didn’t trust the four miles of gravel to the blacktop.

Two miles to Darrell’s I could do. I’d plowed that road a hundred times and I knew where every culvert was.

Kirsten didn’t hesitate when I said Darrell. Why would she? He was her big brother. He’d walked her down the aisle when their dad was too sick to do it.

He’d helped me put a new roof on the machine shed at her folks’ place the summer we married. That’s family out here. You don’t ask. You just knock.

Kirsten came out with Hank zipped inside her parka and a diaper bag over her shoulder.

I put her in the passenger side and went around and got in and put it in four-wheel drive, and we started out of the yard at about the speed a man walks.

I drove it with my window down and my head half out, watching the fence posts on the right side.

Two miles took us twenty-five minutes. Kirsten didn’t say a word the whole way. She was counting Hank’s breaths against her chest.

Darrell’s yard light was on. Their house was a low gray ranch set back off the road, and the drive was drifted halfway across, but I got through it.

I parked by the porch and we went up the steps, and I knocked, and then I knocked again harder.

It took him a while. When he opened the door he was in jeans and a t-shirt, and his hair was flat on one side, and he looked at us like we were the last thing he expected in the world. Which I suppose we were.

That’s when he said it. The $1,200. The hotel. The deadbolt.

I’ve thought a lot about what I did next, standing on that porch. I didn’t pound on the door. I didn’t yell. Part of me wanted to.