The Road I Plowed for My Brother in Law

But I could have gone north first. I had the Hanson place and the Schmidt dairy up north, and the dairy needed to get the milk truck in by noon.

Plenty of operators would have taken the dairy first and nobody would have blinked. And I’ll be honest, I thought about it.

I sat at the corner of the blacktop for a full minute with the grader idling, looking north.

Then I looked west, down the road where Darrell’s yard light was a little pinprick in the dark. And I thought about Lonnie saying the worst night was already going on before you knocked.

And I thought about Arlene coming two blocks through a blizzard with a blanket she’d made for nobody in particular.

I’d love to say I turned west because I’m a good man. I don’t know that I am. I think I turned west because if I’d gone north, I’d have been doing it to him.

And if I went west, I wasn’t doing anything to him at all. I was just doing my job.

I dropped the blade and started down Darrell’s two miles.

The snow was wind-packed and set up like concrete in the drifts. The blade threw it high and rolled it off the shoulder into a snowbank higher than the fence line.

The sky started going light around seven. Not sunrise yet, just that pale gray-blue that comes up out of the snow after a blizzard, when everything is blue and white and the wind has dropped enough that you can hear the engine echo off the shelterbelts a mile away.

I got to Darrell’s approach a little before eight. The drift across it was four feet deep and ran all the way to his machine shed.

He’d have had to spend half the morning clearing it with his loader tractor before he could even get out to feed his cows. The propane truck couldn’t have got in. Neither could anybody else.

I opened it. I cut his approach wide and pushed the drift back off the drive toward the shed so he’d have room to work. It took fifteen minutes.

I wasn’t trying to make a point. I was just doing what I’d have done for any farmer on my route. That’s what I told myself, and I think it was mostly true.

I was backing the grader out onto the road when his porch light came on.

I stopped. I don’t know why. I just sat there with the engine idling and looked at the house, at that yellow light on the porch against all that blue snow. Then the front door opened.

It wasn’t Darrell. It was Lori. She came out onto the porch in a dark parka with the fur hood up, holding a steel thermos against her chest with both arms, the way Kirsten had held Hank coming up those same steps two nights before.

She came down the steps and the whole length of the drive, and stopped at the edge of the road a second, like she was working up to something. I opened the cab door and climbed down onto the step of the grader.

The snow was still blowing off the top of the bank in little curls, and I could feel it on my face.

Lori lifted the thermos. “Wade,” she called across the snow. “Darrell didn’t tell you why.”

Then she came on across the road toward me.