The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

The back forty

He drove slow. Slower than I had. He knew where every hole in that pasture was, and he went around them without looking.

When we got to the old homestead, he stopped forty yards off. He shut the engine down. Then he climbed down off the seat and walked around to the side of the wagon where all the kids could see him.

The sun was going gold on the west fence line again. The cottonwoods were yellow. The grass was the color of a lion.

“My grandpa’s name was Ole Haugen,” Myles said. “He came here from Norway when he was nineteen. He worked on the railroad in Minnesota for three years to save enough money. In the spring of 1883, he walked out here from the depot in Aberdeen and filed a claim on this quarter.”

“He walked?” Noel said.

“Twenty-two miles,” Myles said. “With everything he owned on his back. There wasn’t a tree out here then. Not one. All those cottonwoods, he planted. That was the deal. Plant trees and they’d give you more land.”

He pointed at the corners of the foundation.

“The first winter, he lived in a hole dug into the side of that draw. A dugout. The roof was sod, cut out of this same pasture. He burned twisted hay and cow chips to keep warm, because there wasn’t any wood.”

“Gross,” said one of the new girls.

“Smells better than you’d think,” Myles said, and the kids laughed.

He told them about the claim shanty, twelve feet by fourteen, with tar paper on the outside. He told them about his grandmother coming out from Minnesota on the train with a baby on her lap.

He told them about the blizzard of 1888, when his grandpa tied a rope from the shanty to the barn so he could find his way to the cows and back.

He told them about the stone house, built in 1901, out of rocks they picked off this same field with their hands, one at a time, every spring for ten years.

The kids didn’t move. Not one of them. Fourteen kids on a hay wagon in the cold and not one of them wiggled.

Then Myles said, “My brother Del used to drive this tractor out here every year and I’d tell this. Del died a year ago last March. He was my best friend my whole life.”

He stopped for a second.

“This is the first time I’ve told it without him,” he said. “So thank you for listening to it.”

Gavin put his hand up, like it was school.

“Yes, sir,” Myles said.

“My grandpa died in June,” Gavin said. “Last June. Do you still get sad?”

Myles looked at him for a long moment.

“Every day,” he said. “But it’s a different kind than it was at first. It’s a kind you can carry around. You’ll see.”

Gavin nodded like that made sense.

I was standing by the hitch in my cranberry fleece, where I had stood the year before, and I had to turn around and look at the sunset for a minute, because I was not going to cry in front of fourteen 4-H kids.