The Plow Blade I Welded for Dad

I will say this about Troy, because it is true. He worked hard. He drove forklift at the creamery for nineteen years and never missed a shift that I know of. He coached the boys’ Little League. He was good with his hands, if not always with his words.

In October the creamery let go of thirty-one people. Troy was one of them.

I knew it was bad when Karin stopped answering her phone on Sundays. She has always called Dad on Sunday after church, every week of her married life, and in October and November she stopped.

The second week of November Troy pulled into Dad’s yard with his three-quarter-ton pickup and a borrowed push frame on the front of it.

I was in the shop when he came. I saw him through the window, standing with Dad by the machine shed where the blade hung on its rack for the summer.

I did not hear the start of it. By the time I wiped my hands and walked over, they were already shaking on it.

“Just till I’m back on my feet, Halvard,” Troy was saying. “I can get fifteen, twenty driveways in town after a storm. Sixty dollars apiece. That’s Christmas for the kids.”

“What about the road?” I said.

Troy looked at me the way he has always looked at me, a little sideways, as if I were a tool somebody had left in the wrong drawer.

“I’ll have it back before it snows out here,” he said.

“It snows in town and out here the same night, Troy.”

“I’ll get it back,” he said. “Come on, Inga. It’s a loan.”

Dad put a hand on my arm. That was all it took. He has been putting a hand on my arm since I was four years old and wanted to argue with the minister.

“He’s got three kids,” Dad said quietly. “Help me get it down.”

So we got it down. Dad held the chain, Troy backed his truck around, and I set the pins myself, because the blade had been a truck blade before it was a tractor blade, and it went back on a truck the way a horse goes back to a barn.

Troy drove off with it. Dad stood in the yard and watched him go, and then he walked back into the house, and I heard the kitchen radio come on, the farm report, the way it comes on every day at noon.

Karin called me that night. She was crying before she said hello.

“Please, Inga,” she said. “I know what you’re going to say. Please don’t say it to him.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You will. I know you. Please don’t start a war in this family. He’s barely holding on. He doesn’t sleep. He sits in the truck in the driveway for an hour before he comes in.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone and looked out at the dark yard. My husband was asleep upstairs. He drives a milk truck and leaves at four, and he had already gone to bed.

“He’ll bring it back before it snows?” I said.

“He promised,” Karin said. “He promised me too.”

“All right,” I said.

I meant it. I want that understood. I did not hang up that phone planning anything. I hung up believing my sister, because I have always believed my sister, and because I did not want to be the one who made her cry harder.