The Snow Blower My Son Sold

The man from Mandan

His name was Wendell Pruitt. He was sixty-seven, retired from the power company after thirty-four years of climbing poles, and he had bought the blower for his own driveway. He had run it twice, and it had run beautifully both times.

I went in the house, because I thought my son should do that part himself. I watched through the kitchen window as he walked back and forth in the yard with the phone to his ear, pushing his free hand through his hair. It took a long time.

When he came in, I put a cup of coffee in front of him.

“He said he’d been hoping I’d call,” Chad said. “There was a name on the machine, punched into the chute with a nail, letter by letter. Hollis Halvorsen, in little dots, like somebody had done it with a hammer on a slow night. He said it felt like he had bought a man’s hat.”

I turned toward the window so he would not see my face.

“He’ll bring it back himself, the Saturday after Christmas, when his daughter can drive him. He’ll take what he paid, not a dime more.”

“Where does the nine hundred come from, Chad?”

He drank half the coffee and looked at me with his father’s jaw.

“Night hauling,” he said. “Gravel out of the pit at Hebron, nine to five, after my day job. I’ve done it a week already. I didn’t tell Jenna until Thursday.” A little smile. “She called me an idiot and then she packed my lunch.”

I did not forgive him that morning. Forgiveness is a slow thing, and mine took the whole winter.

But I made him eggs, and at four o’clock, on my porch in the cold, with his hat in his hand, he said, “Mom? The list. Is there a Saturday still open?”

“There are four.”

“Put me down for one.”

“I’m not the one who keeps the list.”

“I know,” my son said. “I’ll tell Orrin.”

The Saturday after Christmas

Wendell Pruitt came on the twenty-sixth of December, a bright cold Saturday, eleven above. He came in a blue pickup with his daughter driving, and the blower was in the bed on aluminum ramps, with a strap across its handles.

He rode with a cane across his knees and the look of a man delivering a thing he is not sure he will be thanked for.

I had told Chad he was coming, and Chad had told Orrin, and Orrin, I discovered when I looked out the window at nine o’clock, had told everyone else.

They were lined up along the lane.

The Thursday men stood in a row on both sides of the packed gravel with their caps in their hands. Marv’s white Ford was parked at the mailbox with the orange light turning.

Gordon and Arlette stood by the tractor, and the Brandvold twins sat on the fence. I counted thirty-four people, and not one of them was talking.

My son was already coming up the lane on foot. He had parked by the mailbox before dawn and waited. He walked up between the two rows of men, and I watched each face as he passed.

I did not see contempt. I did not see judgment. I saw thirty-four people who had decided, without a word, to let a man walk home.

Orrin put out his hand when he came level. My son took it.

“There’s a Saturday open in January.”

“I know. Put me down for the ninth.”

“I’ve already done it,” said Orrin, and he did not let go of his hand for a moment.

Then Wendell stood by the ramps and said to the whole lane, in a voice used to carrying across a pole yard, “I paid nine hundred for this machine. I’m taking nine hundred, and not a cent more.”

My son handed him a bank envelope, soft at the corners, and I knew what it had cost him. Wendell counted out nine hundred dollars on the tailgate and handed back the rest. “Keep that. For the boys. I wasn’t asking.”

Then Chad and the Brandvold twins walked the blower down the ramps. It rolled onto my lane, onto the packed snow, and I put my hand over my mouth.

Chad wheeled it to the machine shed and set it in the square of oil, nose out, and the old men took their caps off again, though I do not know why.

And Orrin, who had not said ten words together in forty years, said quietly, “Hollis would’ve liked to see that.”

“He would have,” I said.