The Mailbox That Would Not Move

“He’s putting my mailbox in the ditch,” Dad said. “That’s a different thing.”

I knew why Royce did it. Everybody on our road knew. In 1994, when the old couple across the road retired, Dad bought their quarter across the road from him and then sold it two years later to a young couple starting out with forty cows. Royce had wanted that ground.

He’d told Dad so. Dad sold it to the kids anyway, at a price Royce said was a gift.

Royce never forgot it. Thirty years and he never once forgot it. He did not say so. He just plowed Dad’s box into the ditch five times in one winter and laughed about a post office box.

I drove home that night thinking about it. My wife had supper on, and my two boys were at the table, and I told them all of it, the cane in the snowbank and Grandpa on his knees in the ditch.

Anders is nineteen. He is in his second year of the welding program at the technical college in town, and he is the quiet one. Pete is sixteen and is not the quiet one.

Pete said, “We should put the box on a railroad tie.”

Anders said, “Royce would snap a tie. That loader would snap anything wood.”

“Then what?”

Anders was quiet for a while, eating. Then he said, “What’s left on that old tractor behind Grandpa’s machine shed?”

I knew the one he meant. It was a 1950s tractor Dad had bought for parts in the seventies and stripped down over twenty years. The engine was long gone. The tires were gone. What was left was a rusted frame sitting in the weeds with the wide front axle still bolted under it.

That front axle was one piece of solid steel, better than seven feet long, heavy enough that it took two men and a bar to roll it.

“You can’t drive a loader through that,” Anders said. “Not without bending something on the loader.”

I sat there with my fork in my hand and thought about it.

Here is the thing I want to be clear on, because I thought about it hard. I did not want to hurt Royce. I did not want to hurt anybody. I did not want a trap. I wanted Dad’s mailbox standing where a mailbox is supposed to stand.

So before we did anything, I called the post office in town and asked the clerk how a rural box is supposed to be set. She told me what I already half knew. The bottom of the box should be forty-one to forty-five inches above the road. The front of the box should sit six to eight inches back from the edge of the road.

Then I went out to Dad’s place with a tape measure and looked at where the old post had been. It had been set exactly right. Dad had measured it himself, the year he put it in.