Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

It paid less. It was ten miles from Dad’s place instead of sixty. I do not think that was an accident.

The cold broke for good the second week of March. The tanks stopped icing over hard. Some mornings there was just a skin on them you could break with a boot heel.

On the nineteenth of March, Dad walked the pasture.

He used a cane, not the walker. Brandt went on one side of him and I went on the other, and we did not hold his arms, because he would not have let us, but we stayed close.

He walked out to the first tank and looked at the pile of ice slabs, gray and melting, slumped in the old snow.

He walked to the second one. Then the third, the one by the road. He stood there a long time.

Then he turned around and walked back to the house, slow, and sat down in the kitchen and did not say anything for a while. I made the coffee. He let me.

“Nine weeks,” he finally said.

“About that.”

“Nine tanks, nine weeks.” He shook his head. “Your mother would have had something to say about it.”

“What would she have said?”

He thought about it. “She’d have said, ‘Orrin, you raised them right, you just raised one of them slow.'”

Brandt was standing at the sink with his back to us. I saw his shoulders move once. He did not turn around.

Dad never asked for the six hundred dollars back. Not that spring, not ever. I know because I asked him about it, once, in April, after the calves started coming.

“Are you going to say anything to him about the money?”

Dad was sitting on the porch in the sun with his cane across his knees, watching a new calf try out its legs in the yard pen. He did not answer for a while.

“The money’s spent,” he said. “He spent it on his truck. A man needs a truck.” He paused. “He needed it more than I did, and he was too proud to ask. I know where he got that. I can’t hold that against him.”

“You could hold the cows against him.”

“I could.” He watched the calf fall down and get up. “But he picked up the axe. He picked it up in front of everybody. That’s harder than it sounds, Wren. You know that.”

I did know that.

The next December, before the first real cold, Brandt drove out on a Sunday after church with a pie and his two boys, the same way he had the year before.

He sat at the kitchen table. Dad was at the head of it, walking without the cane now, pouring his own coffee.

Nobody said anything about the tanks. Not for a long time. We ate the pie. The boys went out to look at the calves.

Then, when Brandt was putting on his coat to leave, Dad stopped him at the door.

“Brandt,” he said.

Brandt turned around.

“Bring your own axe next winter,” Dad said. “That spare one’s Wren’s.”

My brother stood there in the doorway with his hand on the knob. Then he nodded, once, and went out to his truck.

The next January, there was a new axe hanging on the two nails above the workbench in the machine shed, right beside Dad’s. Its handle was wrapped in tape.