The Mailbox That Would Not Move

“Snow’s got to go somewhere,” he said. “Tell your dad to get a box at the post office in town like a sensible person. Then he won’t have to walk out here in the cold.”

“He’s walked out here every day for sixty years.”

“Well,” Royce said. “Maybe sixty years is enough.”

He shut his door. I moved my truck. He went on by with that wing riding way out over the ditch line, and I watched snow and gravel spray off it onto the spot where Dad’s box used to be.

I want to tell you about my dad before I tell you the rest of this, because the rest of it does not make sense unless you know him.

Einar Lindgren milked cows on that place in Otter Tail County for fifty-one years. His father homesteaded it. He married my mother in 1956 and built the house she died in, and he has lived in it alone since she passed eleven years ago.

He walks with a wooden cane now. His knees are mostly gone and one hip is metal. But he gets up at five every morning like the cows are still out there waiting, and every afternoon at about two he puts on his barn coat and his cap and walks a quarter mile down his driveway to get the mail.

That walk is the whole day for him. People think that is sad. It is not sad. It is how he knows he is still himself.

He sees the sky. He sees what the neighbors are hauling. He sees if the neighbors’ heifers got out again. He waves at the bus. He gets his mail and he walks back up that quarter mile, slow, and then he sits at the kitchen table and reads every piece of it, even the ads.

A post office box in town would mean somebody would have to drive him. It would mean the walk was over. Royce knew that as well as I did.

I took Dad home that Tuesday and got him in his chair and made him coffee. His hands were white at the fingertips, and I held them in a dish towel I’d run under warm water until the color came back.

“You can’t be going down in that ditch,” I said.

“It’s my box.”

“It’s your hip, too.”

He sat there with his hands in the towel and looked out the window at the road.

“Five times,” I said. “Dad, I’m going to call the township. Royce works for the board. They can tell him to keep his wing up off the driveways. That’s all it would take.”

Dad shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because a man who calls the township on his neighbor does not have neighbors anymore.” He took his hands out of the towel and looked at them. “Royce lives a mile and a half from me. He’s the one who would pull me out if I went in the ditch with the car. You don’t call the board on a man like that. You live next to him.”

“He’s the one putting you in the ditch.”