Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

Then the steam comes up off it, because the water from the well is warmer than the air by fifty degrees, and the whole tank smokes in the low sun like a kettle.

Nine tanks took me about seventy minutes once I got the hang of it. The yard first, then the east winter pasture, then the far pasture down by the slough.

Then I drove back up to the house, had one cup of coffee with Dad, and went to town to case my mail.

My shoulders hurt the first week like they had never hurt before. By the second week they did not hurt at all.

By the fourth week I could split a slab clean on one swing, and I was a little bit proud of it.

I did not know about the window until later. Dad told me in March, after it was all over, sitting at the kitchen table with his walker parked beside his chair.

“I timed you,” he said.

“What do you mean, you timed me?”

“From the window. Every morning. I could see you pull in, and I could see the steam come up off each tank when you got it open. Four of them I could see from the kitchen. The three in the yard and the first one in the east pasture.”

“And the others?”

“The others I couldn’t see. So I just waited. I’d count it out. When I figured you were at the slough I’d wait about twelve minutes, and then I’d see your truck come back over the rise, and I’d know they were all open.”

He stopped. He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table where the oilcloth was worn through.

“Some mornings I’d stand there the whole time,” he said. “I’d hold on to that walker and I’d stand there. The doctor said not to stand too long. I stood anyway. I wanted to be watching when the steam came up.”

I did not know what to say to that. I still do not.

I think about my father standing at that window every morning in January with his hip full of steel, holding on to his walker, counting the steam, and I have to go and stand somewhere else for a minute.

He did not tell me then. He just had the coffee on every morning, and two pieces of toast with chokecherry jelly, and he asked me how the far tank was, every single day, like it was the only thing he wanted to know.

I found out about the money from Brandt’s wife, of all people. She called me the last week of January. I think she felt she had to tell somebody.

Brandt had been laid off in November. The dealership was cutting back, and he was one of three salesmen they let go the week before Thanksgiving.

He had not told Dad. He had not told me. He had told his wife not to tell anybody either.

The six hundred dollars Dad gave him at the kitchen table went on his own truck payment that same week. He was two months behind.

The truck was the thing he was most afraid of losing, because a man who sells pickups and drives a repossessed one is not a man anybody buys a pickup from.

He had meant to do the tanks. I believe that. He did them for nearly three weeks.