Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

He used to run two hundred cows. He is down to forty now, and he has said every year for five years that this would be the last year. He has never meant it once.

The doctor told him he would not be walking a pasture until spring. Dad heard that and said, “Then I’ll be walking it in March.” The doctor did not argue. I think he had met men like my father before.

The problem was the water. Hay he had figured out. Back in October he had lined up round bales along the windbreak, and a custom feeder down the road came by twice a week with his tractor and set fresh bales in the rings.

But tanks have to be opened every single day in a North Dakota winter, sometimes twice.

Dad’s water comes off the yard well through buried line to float valves, deep enough to keep from freezing, but the tops still ice over every night when it drops past twenty below.

Three of the tanks in the yard had heaters. Two of those had burned out in November and he had not got to them yet.

The other six tanks sat out in the winter pastures where the power line never went, so they got chopped or they got nothing.

Nine tanks is a lot of tanks for forty cows. Dad kept them all because he had built them all, back when he ran more, and because spreading the cows out over the pastures kept them off each other and kept the yard from turning to soup in the spring.

Someone had to go out every morning with an axe. Dad could not even get his own boots on yet.

My brother Brandt came out the Sunday after Dad got home from the hospital.

He brought a store pie and his two boys, and he sat at the kitchen table and listened while Dad laid it out.

Brandt is four years older than me. He sold pickups at a dealership in Minot, and he was good at it. He could talk to anybody.

When we were kids he could talk Dad out of a whipping and talk me out of my lunch money in the same afternoon.

“Every day,” Dad said. “Every tank. If it’s thirty below you go twice. I’ll give you six hundred dollars for the winter.”

“Dad, you don’t have to pay me,” Brandt said.

“I’m paying you,” Dad said. “It’s a job. A man gets paid for a job.”

He counted it out of the coffee can in the cupboard, six hundred dollars in twenties, and pushed it across the oilcloth.

Brandt took it and folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, and then he shook Dad’s hand.

I sat across from them and said nothing. I remember thinking it was a lot of money for Dad and not much money for the job.

I remember thinking it was sixty miles each way from Minot. I did not say either thing. It was not my deal.

I carry a rural route out of Towner, a little over a hundred miles of gravel and section roads, and I had my own house and my own husband and my own work. Brandt had volunteered. I let him.

That is the part I come back to sometimes. I let him.

For a while it worked, or I thought it did. Brandt came out in the mornings, chopped the tanks, and drove back to Minot.