Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

If I had pushed it then, he would have had to pick a side at his own kitchen table with a pin in his hip, and I was not going to do that to him.

So I did the only thing I could do that did not need anybody else to keep a promise. I did it myself.

My husband Arnie works rotations in the oil patch outside Williston, two weeks on and two weeks off.

That January he had just left for the first two weeks. He called me that night from the man camp.

“I’ll take the mornings when I’m home,” he said. “You take them when I’m gone. We’ll make it work.”

“It’s ninety minutes, Arnie. Maybe more.”

“Then we get up ninety minutes earlier.”

That is Arnie. He has never once in nineteen years told me something could not be done.

He has told me plenty of times that I was doing it wrong, but never that it could not be done.

The next morning I went to see Tove. She has been our postmaster in Towner for eleven years, and she grew up on a place not three miles from Dad’s. I did not have to explain much.

“Rural routes are paid by the route, not the clock,” she said. “I don’t care what time you case your mail, as long as every box on that route gets its mail before five o’clock. Go chop your dad’s tanks.”

So I set my alarm for an hour earlier than I had ever set it in my life.

In January in McHenry County the sun does not come up until about a quarter after eight, so I left my house in the first gray light and got to Dad’s yard just as the sky went gold.

I never once chopped in the dark. I did not want to, and I did not need to.

The cows did not care what time it was, as long as the water was open by midmorning.

Every morning was the same. I pulled on my black insulated bibs, my tan canvas chore coat, and the red knit cap my daughter made me in her 4-H days, the one that is too big and comes down over my ears. I braided my hair and let it hang down my back.

I drove the white pickup I use for the route out the trail to the first tank.

I left it running, parked on the frozen track behind me, and took the axe off the seat.

The ice came up in plates. On the cold mornings it was three or four inches and took a dozen swings.

On the warm ones, if anything about January in North Dakota can be called warm, it was two inches and came up in three.

I stacked the broken slabs on the snow beside each tank, the way Dad had always done it, leaning them up so they would not freeze back into the drift.

By the end of February each tank had a little wall of ice around it, like a fort.

The cows learned the truck. By the third morning they were already lined up when I pulled in, black backs white with frost, breath hanging over them in a cloud.

They would wait three feet behind me while I swung, and they would not crowd until the water showed.

There is a sound open water makes when the slab comes off, a kind of sigh.