The Mailbox That Would Not Move

Royce’s wing had not been clipping a box that was too close to the road. It had been reaching off the road, onto the driveway approach, a good foot past where it needed to be.

So we would set it in the same spot. The legal spot. If his wing stayed on the road where it belonged, he would never touch it. If it went past the road, it would find out what Dad’s old tractor was made of.

When I told Dad the plan, he did not say yes right away.

He sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and listened to all of it. Anders drew it out on the back of an electric bill. The axle, four feet down. The concrete. A steel plate welded on top to sit the box on.

“Four feet,” Dad said. “In February.”

“Frost is about three feet right now,” I said. “Maybe a little more.”

“You won’t get an auger through that.”

“No, sir. Not cold.”

He knew what I was going to say. He had buried enough friends in a Minnesota winter to know how it was done.

“Torvald,” he said.

Torvald runs the backhoe for the township cemetery. When somebody dies in January out here, they still have to be buried, and the way it is done is with a ground thaw blanket. It is a big heated pad you lay on the frozen ground with a propane heater, and you leave it overnight, and the frost comes out of it.

I called Torvald that night. He said he wasn’t burying anybody that week, thank the Lord, and I could have it Friday.

“What do you need it for?” he asked.

I told him.

He was quiet on the phone for a second. Then he said, “I’ll bring it out myself.”

Friday morning he did. He laid the thaw blanket out at the end of Dad’s driveway, right over the stub of the old post, and he hooked up the heater and ran it on a tank of propane. It hummed there all day and all night.

Dad stood at his kitchen window that afternoon and watched it.

“Torvald was in my confirmation class,” he said. “His brother, I mean. Torvald is too young. His brother was in my class.”

Saturday morning was bright and cold, about eight above, with the sun coming hard off every field in the county. Before chores were done, the boys and I had the old axle loose from the tractor frame.

That took some doing. The bolts had rusted into the frame sometime around the Nixon administration. Anders cut them with the torch in the end. He worked steady and careful, with his hood down and his leather gloves on, and I stood back and watched my son do something I could not.

Then he took the axle into Dad’s shop and welded a square steel plate on the top end, three-eighths inch thick. He drilled it and set Dad’s old box on it to check the fit.