Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

Then he set his feet the way Dad taught us both when we were small, and the next one bit, and the one after that cracked the slab clean across.

We finished that tank together without a word. I levered up my half and he levered up his, and we stacked them on the pile, and the cows came in behind us to the steaming water.

Then he went to the next tank. I followed him.

We did the last of the east pasture together, him and me and the lineman.

Then Brandt walked back across to the road, still not saying anything, and climbed through the fence again, more careful this time, and got back in the truck.

I walked over to the ditch. I do not know why. I just wanted to see Dad’s face.

Dad rolled the window down. He looked at me, and then past me at the tanks, steaming in a row in the low sun.

He looked at Brandt, who had his hands on the wheel and his torn coat and his red hands, and was breathing hard and staring at the dashboard.

“You’ll be late for therapy,” I said.

“Therapy can wait ten minutes,” Dad said.

That was all. He rolled the window back up. Brandt put the truck in gear and drove on toward town, slow.

Sig came down from the yard and stood beside me on the edge of the ditch, leaning on his yellow-handled axe.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

“Took him long enough.”

“It did.”

Sig nodded. “Your dad pulled one calf that night in ’79 that we all gave up on,” he said. “Backwards and blue. He worked on that calf half an hour. Rubbed it with straw till it breathed. Some things just come slow.”

Then he went back to his truck and drove home.

Brandt came every morning after that. Not twice a week. Every morning.

He was there before me most days, standing at the first tank in a pair of Dad’s old insulated coveralls he must have dug out of the porch closet, with the spare axe.

He never brought it up, and I never asked him to. He never said he was sorry. I do not think he knew how. Halvorsens are not good at that part.

But I noticed he stopped wearing the good town coat. And I noticed the spare axe started showing up with its handle wrapped in tape, like Sig’s.

Sig kept coming too, and so did the bus driver and the lineman, at least for a while.

By the end of February there were mornings with six of us and nine tanks, and we were done before the coffee in the thermos cooled off.

Brandt and Sig started working the far tanks together, down by the slough, because Sig’s knees did not like the walk and Brandt’s back was younger.

I would look over and see them out there, the old man and my brother, swinging in turns, and the steam coming up between them.

I found out later that Sig had a word with Brandt one of those mornings. I do not know what he said.

Brandt never told me and Sig never told anybody. Whatever it was, it was said down by the slough, between two men, with nobody else around. That seemed right.

In the middle of February Brandt got on at the implement dealer in Towner, selling tractors instead of pickups.