On the first of November, I walked out to the machine shed to start Hollis’s snow blower, and there was nothing in the place where it sat but a square of oil on the concrete.
For twenty-six winters that machine had stood just inside the big door, nose out, under a blue tarp, with the chute pointed at the lane like a dog waiting to be let out.
Every first of November, Hollis rolled back the tarp, primed the carburetor three times, and pulled the cord. If it caught, winter could come.
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He died in March. A heart that had been warning him for years, and a man who never once listened to a warning. He was seventy-one.
We were married forty-four years, and I never heard him say he was afraid of anything except a slow week in the wheat market and a lane full of snow with a sick cow on the far side of it.
After the funeral, when the casseroles stopped and the house went quiet in a way I did not know a house could, I decided to learn that machine properly. In October I took it out myself.
I primed it three times and pulled the cord. It caught on the second pull, and I stood in the yard with that red engine shaking my arms and cried so hard I had to shut it off.
That is why I went out on the first of November. Not because I needed it yet. Because I had promised myself, and because it was the day.
The tarp was folded on the workbench. Folded in thirds, the way you fold a flag, with the corners squared. My son had folded it.
That is the part I could not set down for a week. A person who steals a thing throws the tarp. A person who folds the tarp has decided he is doing something reasonable.
On the nail where the tarp hung was an index card in Hollis’s square printing. I had read that card every October of my married life without ever really reading it.
It said how to start the machine. Choke half, prime three, key, pull. Then, on the last line, in smaller letters: If she cannot get it going, call Chad. He will come. He just has to be asked.
I stood in the doorway of a machine shed on a farm outside Harlow, North Dakota, with a quarter mile of gravel lane running away from my feet toward the county road. And I knew, before I called anybody, exactly whose hand had taken it.