The Snow Blower My Son Sold

The man with the plow

I got up the second morning the way you get up after being hit by something. I put on the coat and took the scoop and started where I had left off.

At twenty to seven, in the blue before sunrise, I heard a diesel come up the county road, slow, with the heavy rattle of a plow blade riding high. I did not look up. I figured it was the township truck going by.

It slowed. It stopped.

At the end of the lane, a quarter mile off, was a big white Ford with an orange light going around on its roof and a blade as wide as a barn door.

It sat there idling the way a man sits when he is thinking a thing through. Then the light went off, and the truck turned in, blade down, and began to eat the lane.

Gravel and snow and steel, coming toward me like a train, throwing a curl of white taller than the cab. The whole bathtub, the thing I had been scratching at with a dishpan, came apart in nine minutes.

It stopped fifteen feet from me. Marv Tollefson climbed down. He is a long, slow, sixty-two-year-old man with a face like a dried apple, and he has not wasted a word in the forty years I have known him.

He looked at the scoop in my hand. He did not say a word about the blower.

“I was by Saturday night,” he said. “Couldn’t get in. Figured I’d see how you were doing.”

“I’m fine, Marv. I’ll pay you for the push. What is it now, sixty?”

He took off his cap, turned it once in his hands, and put it back on.

“Bonnie. In March of oh-three, my stock trailer went off the road into the Knife River slough in the middle of the night with four heifers in it. Your husband came out with that old Farmall and a chain and stood in water to his waist for five hours and would not take a dime. I tried to pay him for twenty years. He’d say, You’ll pay me back when I need it.” He looked at the lane. “I figure I’m about eleven hundred pushes behind.”

I tried to say something and could not. He nodded as if I had, and plowed the rest of the way to the house, and cleared the front of the machine shed and the path to the propane tank without being asked.

At the gate he rolled down the window. “Wednesday, ten, right? The clinic?”

I stared at him. I had told no one.

“Colleen’s my niece,” Marv said. “Gordon’ll come do the bathtub with the tractor, it wants a wider cut. I’ll be back after the next one.”

And he was gone in a wake of blowing white. I stood on my own lane with a scoop in my hand and nothing to scoop, and I put it down in the snow.