Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

But the cold came, and his truck really did not want to start on those mornings, and he did not have the gas money to make the drive every day anyway, and he could not stand to say any of that out loud.

So he just did not come. And then it had been two days, and then it was too late to say anything that would not sound worse than the silence.

I understood the pride. I grew up with the same father he did. Halvorsens do not ask for help. We are taught it like we are taught to close gates.

What I did not understand was the cows standing at the ice. You can be too proud to tell your father you lost your job.

You cannot be too proud to tell him his cows are dry. There was a phone in Brandt’s pocket the whole time.

I did not call him after his wife told me. I thought about it. I thought about driving to Minot.

In the end I just kept chopping. I figured he knew I knew. That was enough.

The third week, there was somebody at the first tank when I pulled in.

It was barely light. I saw a truck I did not know parked at the yard gate, and a man in a brown coat and a fur cap with the flaps down, leaning on an axe like it was a cane.

My first thought was that Brandt had sent somebody. My second thought was that the man was too old to be anybody’s hired help.

It was Sig Ostby. He is 81. He ranched the section north of Dad’s for sixty years before his knees gave out and he sold his cows to his nephew.

He lives in a little house at the edge of Towner now, and he goes to the coffee table at the elevator every morning at seven.

“Morning, Wren,” he said.

“Sig. What are you doing out here?”

“I’m chopping ice.” He looked at the tank. “Well. I was going to. You were late.”

“I’m not late. I’m right on time.”

“Then I was early.” He lifted the axe off the snow. It was his own axe. I could tell because it had a newer handle than Dad’s, a bright yellow one, and he had wrapped tape around the grip.

“I didn’t ask you to come, Sig.”

“Didn’t ask you,” he said. “Your dad pulled my calves in a blizzard in ’79. I had two coming wrong and the vet couldn’t get through. Your dad came over on the tractor. He was out there in my barn till three in the morning. I’ve owed him for forty-seven years.”

He turned and walked toward the east pasture, slow, stepping careful on the ice. “I’ll take the far ones,” he said over his shoulder. “You take the yard. My knees don’t like the slough.”

I stood there with Dad’s axe and watched him go. Then I chopped the yard tanks, and when I looked up, I could see the steam coming off the east pasture tank behind him.

I do not know exactly how word got around. Sig sits at the coffee table at the elevator, and the coffee table at the elevator is how word gets around anything in McHenry County. By the first week of February there were two more.