Eleven Driveways Cleared by Noon

We didn’t talk. You don’t, running two machines. He took the yard and I took the drive and the turnaround where the milk truck swings in, and between us we had it open in thirty-five minutes. The truck came down the blacktop at five after ten, turned in without slowing, and the driver gave two short honks.

Sonja came out of the milk house in her chore coat and walked right up to the loader.

“I’ve had my stomach in a knot for two days,” she said. “We’d have dumped tomorrow.” She put her hand on the tire, which was taller than she was. “What do we owe you?”

“Nothing. It’s a snowstorm.”

“Then you come for supper Sunday,” she said, “and you bring your dad and your aunt.” She looked down the road toward Hollis’s place. “And you be careful at the end there.”

“I’m always careful,” I said.

The seventh and eighth were a retired couple who winter in Arizona, so their place was empty, and a young family who’d just bought the old schoolhouse and fixed it up. I did them both.

The schoolhouse family’s little girl came out with a plate of cookies wrapped in foil and handed it up to me with both hands, very solemn. I added it to the eggs and the coffee by my boots.

By the ninth driveway, people were waving from every porch on the road.

I mean every one. I’d look up from the bucket and see a hand go up from a step, or a window, or the shoulder. Somebody tooted a horn. The twins were running up and down their cleared drive, both of them waving now, all the time, at nothing, at everything.

I didn’t wave back much. My hands were busy and my face was frozen stiff, and honestly, I didn’t trust myself. Something had gotten into my throat around the sixth driveway and stayed there.

The ninth house was the last before Dad’s, a young man who hauls hay and had already shoveled most of his drive himself, out of pure stubbornness. I finished it for him anyway. He stood at the end and saluted me with his shovel.

The tenth was Dad’s place.

I hadn’t been sure I’d do it at all, since I’d come from there, but the drift across the end of the farm drive had filled back in from the wind, so I opened it up again. Dad was out on the porch in his coat and his slippers, leaning on his cane, which he swore up and down he did not need.

He didn’t say anything. He just nodded at me. One nod.

Then he went inside, and two minutes later he came out in his boots with his truck keys, and I knew he was going to drive down to Aunt Ione’s. He doesn’t do well sitting still.

I looked at my watch. Twenty past eleven. Ten driveways.

That left one.

I took the loader back down the road toward the tee, the whole two miles, in road gear. It took a long time. And all the way down, the people on the shoulders turned to watch me go by.

Nobody said anything. They could all see where I was going.

Hollis’s lane comes off the road right beside Aunt Ione’s drive, maybe forty feet apart. It runs a quarter mile back through his yard to the house and the shop, and it was drifted shut the whole way, smooth and blue in the shadows, untouched since the storm.

His house was still dark. His shades were still down.