The Mailbox That Would Not Move

It was Dad’s box. That was the one thing Dad had asked. Not a new one. That dented gray box he had put up in 1979, with the door that never shut right since the third time Royce took it out. Anders straightened the door as well as he could and bolted the box down through the plate.

Anders had to work a shift at the parts store that afternoon, so he left right after. He shook his grandfather’s hand before he went. Dad held on to it a little longer than usual.

At about ten we pulled the thaw blanket. Torvald was right. The ground under it was soft and dark and steaming in the sun.

I brought the skid loader over from my place with the auger on it and drilled the hole. Twenty-four-inch bit, four feet down, straight as I could make it. Pete stood off to the side and called it plumb as I went.

Then we set an old steel barrel, both ends cut out, over the top of the hole for a collar. It would keep the concrete in a good round shape where it met the ground and keep the gravel from caving in while it set.

We rolled the axle off the trailer with a bar and stood it up in the hole with the skid loader. It took all three of us to swing it in. Even Dad had a hand on it. I told him to stand back and he told me it was his mailbox.

I mixed the concrete in the old mixer with hot water carried down from Dad’s house in milk cans. Eighteen bags. In that cold you do not have long. You pour it, you tamp it, you cover it, and you keep it warm, or it freezes before it cures and crumbles in the spring.

It was a little before noon when we got the last of it in.

I can see it still. The sun was straight up and the whole world was white. The gravel road ran off toward the county blacktop, and the fields on both sides of it were flat and bright as a sheet.

I stood there in my tan work coat and my black stocking cap and tamped the last of the concrete around that axle with the blade of my shovel. Pete, in his green coat, held the level up against the post, first one side and then the other.

“Plumb,” he said. “Dead plumb, Dad.”

And Dad came down the driveway on his cane, slow, in his brown barn coat and the red plaid cap with the earflaps down. He walked right up to the post and put his free hand on top of his old gray box.

He did not say anything. He just stood there, and he smiled.

I’ll tell you what I thought right then. I thought, I have not seen him smile like that since Mom.

We covered the concrete with straw bales and an old electric blanket of Mom’s on an extension cord from the shop, and over that a tarp, weighted down with chunks of firewood. It would have to sit three days before anybody leaned on it, and a week before it was hard.