Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

One was a man who farms west of Dad and drives the school bus in the mornings.

The other was a retired lineman who had moved back from Bismarck to the house he grew up in. I barely knew either one of them. They knew Dad.

They worked it out among themselves. The bus driver took Mondays and Wednesdays after his route. The lineman took Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Sig came every day, whether it was his day or not, and nobody had the nerve to tell him to stay home.

On the mornings Arnie was home from the patch, there were sometimes five of us out there. Five axes for nine tanks.

We were done in twenty minutes and standing around the tailgate drinking coffee out of the thermos Dad sent with me.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said what a shame it was about Brandt. Nobody asked me where he was.

I think they all knew, the way a small town knows things, without anybody saying them out loud.

They just showed up, chopped, nodded at me, and went home to their own chores.

Once, the lineman was working the tank by the windbreak and humming. It took me a minute to catch the tune. It was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” the one they sing at the Lutheran church in town every time somebody dies. My mother had it at hers.

I did not say anything. I just stood at my own tank and listened to an old man hum my mother’s hymn while he broke ice for my father’s cows, and I let the cold be the reason my eyes were watering.

Here is the part I have never quite known how to tell.

Dad had physical therapy in Minot twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten.

Arnie could not take him when he was on rotation, and I had my route, and Dad could not drive yet with his right hip.

Brandt drove him. He had offered at Christmas, before the cold snap, before anything. And whatever else he stopped doing, he kept doing that.

Twice a week he drove sixty miles out from Minot, picked Dad up at the house, and drove sixty miles back.

I never asked why he would make that drive and not the other one. I think I know.

The therapy was a thing he could do sitting down, in his own truck, with the heater on, where nobody could see him. The tanks were a thing everybody could see.

The only road from Dad’s yard to the highway runs along the section line.

It goes right past the yard pens, and right past the east pasture, and the third tank sits maybe forty feet from the ditch.

So twice a week, at about a quarter to nine, my brother drove past all of us.

Past me in my red cap, past Sig in his fur hat, past whichever neighbor had that morning, past the cows lined up at the steaming water. With Dad in the passenger seat.

Dad never said a word about it. Not to Brandt, not to me.

He just sat there with his hands folded on his walker, which Brandt had to fold up and lift into the back every time, and looked out the side window at the tanks.

Brandt kept his eyes on the road. The first few times, he sped up a little when he passed.