The first thing I saw when I turned onto Dad’s road that Tuesday afternoon was his cane. It was standing straight up in the snowbank by the end of his driveway, like somebody had planted it there.
The second thing I saw was Dad. He was down in the ditch on his knees, ninety-one years old, digging in the snow with his bare hands.
I did not shut the truck off. I just threw it in park in the middle of the township road and went over the bank after him.
“Dad. Dad, stop. What are you doing down here?”
He looked up at me with snow in his eyebrows and his red plaid cap pushed back. His cheeks were bright red from the cold and his hands were worse.
“Looking for the box,” he said. “The mail came. I saw the carrier go by. It has to be down here somewhere.”
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The post was snapped off at the ground. A splintered stub of treated four-by-four stuck up out of the snow, and the rest of it was gone under the windrow the plow had thrown off the road.
I got my arm under his and lifted him. He did not weigh what he used to. Under that brown barn coat there was not much left of the man who carried two milk cans at a time up the barn hill.
“Get in the truck,” I said. “Get warm. I’ll find it.”
“I can find my own mailbox, Wade.”
“I know you can. Get in the truck anyway.”
He did, because he was shaking, and he knew it. I set his cane in beside him and turned the heater all the way up and went back down into the ditch.
I found the box about twenty feet down, upside down under two feet of packed snow and gravel. The door was bent. The flag was folded flat against the side. Inside were three envelopes and the church bulletin, soaked through.
That was the fifth time since the first snow in December. Five times by the second week of February.
While I was down there digging, I heard the loader coming back.
Royce Hatlestad plows the township roads out our way on contract. He has a big yellow loader with a front blade and a wing on the side, and he is good at it, I will give him that. He can clear our whole stretch in an afternoon.
He came back up the road on his second pass, slow, and he saw my truck sitting in the middle of the road and Dad inside it. He opened his cab door and leaned out.
“You might want to move that rig, Wade.”
“You took Dad’s box out again, Royce.”
He laughed. It was not a mean laugh, exactly. It was worse than that. It was the laugh of a man who thinks the thing is funny and figures you ought to think so too.