The Road I Plowed for My Brother in Law

I put my hand flat on his back and felt him breathing, slow and even, and I felt something in my chest let go that I hadn’t known was holding.

Around three in the morning the side door opened, and a woman came in out of the storm with snow all over her shoulders and something folded in her arms.

She was a small woman in a long coat and rubber overshoes. Lonnie came out of the radio room and said, “Arlene, I told you not to come out in this.”

“It’s two blocks, Lonnie,” she said. “I’ve walked two blocks in worse.” That was Arlene Fiske, his wife.

Lonnie had called home after he got us settled and told her there was a baby at the station. That’s all she needed to hear.

She came over to our cots and knelt down by Kirsten, slow, the way people do when their knees have stopped cooperating. She unfolded what she was carrying.

It was a baby blanket, crocheted, soft white with a pale yellow border, and the little shell stitch you see on the good ones.

“I make these for the gift box at church,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her over the heater.

“For the new babies in the congregation. I’ve had this one done since Thanksgiving. I didn’t know who it was for.”

She tucked it around Hank with her old careful hands. “He needs it more than the box does.”

Kirsten put her face down on that blanket and cried. Not loud. Just a long, slow crying that had been waiting since the porch.

Arlene sat on the floor beside her with one hand on her back, and didn’t say anything at all, and didn’t need to.

After a while Arlene patted my shoulder twice, the way an aunt does, and went home through the snow. I never even thanked her that night. I was too far gone.

I didn’t sleep. Kirsten did, finally, with her hand on Hank.

I lay on my back on that cot and looked at the steel trusses in the ceiling and listened to the wind trying to get in through the bay doors, and I did the math on $1,200 over and over.

Here’s what the money was. Last August, when Kirsten was about five months along, we found out her deductible at the hospital was going to be $3,000 before the insurance paid a dime.

Our insurance is decent, but it’s not free. We had about half of it saved. We were short.

Darrell heard about it from their mother, I think. He came over one Sunday afternoon that August and sat at our kitchen table and wrote me a check for $1,500 without my asking. “Pay it back when you can,” he said. “No hurry.”

I wrote out a note on the back of a feed store receipt pad he had in his coat. Fifteen hundred dollars, Wade Lindgren, signed and dated. He folded it into his wallet.

We paid $100 in September, $100 in October, $100 in November. Then Kirsten had to quit her job at the clinic in town early because her blood pressure was up, and money got tight, and the payments slid.

I meant to catch up after the harvest overtime came through. Then Hank came three weeks early, and I didn’t catch up.

He hadn’t come to the hospital when Hank was born. Lori sent a card with a twenty-dollar bill in it.

Darrell hadn’t come out to the house to see the baby either, not once in three weeks, and Kirsten had noticed that.