The Snow Blower My Son Sold

The first storm

It came on the seventh of November, a Saturday, the way they do up here, not falling so much as arriving. The forecast had said four to six inches.

By four in the afternoon the wind had come around out of the northwest at forty miles an hour, and the world outside my kitchen window had gone the color of a pillowcase.

My lane is a quarter mile of gravel from the back door to the county road, running between a shelterbelt of caragana on one side and Gordon Lien’s open stubble field on the other.

All the wind in Dakota comes across that stubble and drops its load on my lane, in a long smooth drift Hollis called the bathtub. In a bad year the bathtub is four feet deep and hard as a sidewalk.

I was not afraid of being snowed in. I had beans put up and a freezer full of Hollis’s venison. What I was afraid of was Wednesday.

I take a blood thinner, and it has to be checked every month at the clinic in Harlow, a finger prick and a number. Hollis had driven me to every appointment for six years.

Wednesday at ten was this month’s, and a nurse named Colleen had told me, kindly, not to go past five weeks.

By Sunday night it stopped. The sky cleared to a hard black full of stars, and the cold came down behind the wind like a lid. Eleven below.

I went out on the back step in Hollis’s barn coat, which I had taken to wearing in March and never given back to the hook, and looked down the lane.

It was gone. Not blocked. Gone. The wind had moved thirteen inches into the bathtub until it was smooth as a bedsheet, three feet high at the shelterbelt, with the fence posts sticking out of it like ribs.

I stood there a long time. Then I went in and thought about my son’s text.

The grain scoop

At first light on Monday I put on two pairs of socks and Hollis’s coat, went out to the machine shed, and took down the grain scoop.

It is an aluminum scoop the size of a dishpan, with a wooden handle worn dark by forty years of Hollis’s right hand. The oil stain was still on the floor beside me. I did not look at it.

I started at the back step and worked toward the road. Lift, throw, step. The snow on top flew off the blade, but underneath it was packed as hard as a table, and every fourth scoop I had to stab at it with the corner.

I want to tell you I was angry. I was not. What I felt, scooping snow in my dead husband’s coat while the sun came up red over the stubble, was something much quieter. It was the feeling of a person doing the next thing.

By nine I had made it to the clothesline pole. Sixty feet. My hip had started up its old talk. A quarter mile is thirteen hundred and twenty feet, and I did the arithmetic standing there, because I kept the farm books for thirty years.

At that rate I would reach the road in eleven days, if I did not die in a ditch of my own stubbornness.

I did not ask for help. Gordon Lien has a tractor with a blade. Marv Tollefson plows half the lanes in the county for sixty dollars a push.

Orrin Sather from church had told me at the funeral, with his hat in both hands, to call him for anything, and I knew he meant it.

But each of them would have asked, kindly, Where’s Hollis’s blower? And I would have had to say, My son sold it, to men who had known him since he was in a car seat.

I could not do that to Chad. Not yet. It was easier to freeze.