Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

He said he would have sixty rings bent by morning if I would quit standing there and go make supper.

That was Dwain’s way of saying he was on my side.

Thirty-four years married, and that man has never once said the words out loud. But he has bent an awful lot of wire for me over the years.

I called my daughter after supper. Her two, Bernadine and Garland, were staying with us that week while she worked her shifts at the hospital, and they never missed wreath Saturday.

Then I called Josh. He was still out on the truck, and I could hear the pump running behind him.

When I told him, there was a long quiet on the line. “Mom,” he said finally. “I never told her. I forgot to tell her what they were.”

His voice was low, the way it went when he was a boy and had broken something.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “But she knew they were mine, Josh.” He did not argue with that.

He did not try to. He just breathed on the line for a while.

He said he would bring Kenna and Noble over first thing in the morning if the school called off, and the radio was already saying it would.

Kaylee was working a day shift at the care center.

The cold came down hard that night. By six in the morning the wind chill was thirty-one below zero, and the school called off classes, and the bus never came down our road.

By half past seven I had four grandchildren at my kitchen table eating oatmeal with brown sugar. The windows were frosted solid on the north side of the house.

Bernadine was twelve and bossy in the good way. Garland was ten and wanted to be the one to run the loppers.

He had been asking to run them since he was seven. Kenna was eight and had her mother’s dark eyes and her mother’s quiet.

Noble was six and had already spilled his milk twice before I got the oatmeal on the table.

Kaylee’s two did not know what their mother had done. I had decided in the night that they would not hear it from me. Nobody was going to make a child carry that on my account.

When Bernadine asked why we were making the wreaths all over again, I told her the first batch got thrown away by mistake. That was true as far as it went, and it went far enough.

“Grandma,” Bernadine said, looking out at the snow blowing flat across the yard, “we are not going out in that.” I said, “We are, but not for long, and not past the shelterbelt.”

The shelterbelt runs along the north side of our yard, eight rows deep. Dwain’s father planted it in 1958, when the government was still helping farmers put in trees.

The two north rows are eastern red cedar, tall and dark, and inside them the wind just stops.

You can stand in there in a January blizzard and hear yourself think.

Dwain had the rings done. Sixty of them hung over the back of a kitchen chair like a stack of bracelets, every one bent round on that bucket and twisted shut with the fencing pliers.

He had gone out to feed cattle before any of us were up. There was a pot of coffee on and a note on the table in his square handwriting that said only, Sixty.