Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

After a while he stopped doing that. After a while he just drove slow and did not look.

Sig never looked up. The bus driver lifted one finger off the axe handle, the way you lift a finger off the steering wheel to a car you pass on a gravel road.

The lineman just kept humming. I tried not to watch, and mostly I did not manage it.

That went on for nearly two weeks. Four times my brother drove his father past the crew of old men doing his job.

It was a bright morning, the kind that comes after a cold snap breaks. Twelve below and no wind.

The sky was the hard clear blue you only get in the dead of winter, and the sun was up over the shelterbelt, low and gold.

There were three of us that day: me, Sig, and the lineman. I was on the third tank, the one by the road.

Sig was finishing the yard. The lineman was out in the east pasture.

I heard Brandt’s truck before I saw it. You know the sound of your brother’s truck. I kept swinging. The ice was about three inches that morning and coming up good.

Then I heard the truck slow down.

I looked up. It had stopped on the road, right across the ditch from me, maybe forty feet off. The engine was running. Dad was in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead.

Brandt sat there for a while. I do not know how long. Long enough for me to get one more slab up and lay it on the pile.

Then the driver’s door opened, and he got out.

He was not dressed for it. He had on his town coat, the good wool one he used to wear on the lot, and leather gloves, and shoes that were not boots.

He walked down into the ditch and up the other side, and the snow came over the tops of those shoes, and he did not seem to notice.

He came up to the fence and stopped there. He put his hands in his coat pockets.

He looked at the tank, and at the cows behind me, and at the pile of ice.

Then he looked at the spare axe. I always carried two now, Dad’s and a cheap one from the farm store, because some mornings Arnie came and some mornings somebody forgot theirs. It was stuck blade down in the snow beside me.

Nobody said anything. Sig had stopped chopping up in the yard. The lineman had stopped humming.

Brandt took his hands out of his pockets. He took off his good leather gloves and put them in his coat.

He climbed through the barbed wire the way we did as kids, one foot on the bottom strand and his back pushing up the middle one, and he caught his good coat on a barb and tore it, and he did not stop.

He walked over and pulled the spare axe out of the snow.

He did not look at me. He went to the other side of the tank and started swinging.

He was rusty. He hit wrong the first couple of times and the axe bounced and stung his hands, and I saw him wince.