The Mailbox That Would Not Move

We sat there a long time in the sun after that, the two of us, not talking, while a pair of geese came over low from the slough and the meadowlarks sang in the ditch grass.

Royce never did come up to the house for coffee that winter.

But in May, Dad found a letter in his box with the flag up. It was stamped and addressed to the county highway department. In the corner it had Royce’s return address.

Dad stood there and looked at it a while.

Then he put it back in the box, and put the flag up for the carrier, and walked back up the driveway.

He never asked Royce what was in it. He did not have to. In June, the township board posted a notice in the paper that the snow contract for our road would now specify that wings would be kept on the traveled surface and off all driveway approaches.

It was the first rule anybody could remember Royce asking for.

The next winter, after the first snow, I drove over to Dad’s to see. The road was plowed clean, the shoulders pushed back neat and square, and the snow was laid off in a long white bank down both ditches.

And there was a clean, careful curve in that bank, all the way around the end of Dad’s driveway. A good four feet of room on every side of the post. Somebody had taken the time to do it right.

Dad walked down that afternoon for his mail, same as every day. Same quarter mile, same cane, same red plaid cap with the earflaps.

I watched him from the truck. He got to the end of the drive and put his hand on the axle, where his name was, the way you’d pat an old dog. Then he opened his box.

There was a Christmas card inside. No stamp on it. Somebody had driven it over and put it in by hand.

It said Merry Christmas, Einar, in big block letters, and under that it was signed by Royce.

Dad read it standing right there in the road. Then he put it in his coat pocket, and he looked down the road toward Royce’s place for a while, and then he started back up the driveway.

He has kept that card on his refrigerator ever since.

The axle is still there. I expect it will be there long after all of us are gone. You could not get it out of the ground now with anything short of a dragline.

Dad is ninety-two now. He still walks down for the mail every afternoon at two, and people still bring their letters by, and the kids on the bus still knock on the windows.

Every so often I drive by when he is not out, and I see it standing there at the end of the drive in the bright cold, that old rusted axle with E. Lindgren on it in white.

The flag on the box is up, and Royce plows wide around it now.