The Plow Blade I Welded for Dad

“I had seven to do,” he said.

“I know how many you had to do,” Hedvig said. “I’ve been counting them for twenty-five years.”

I was standing at the front of the tractor, by the blade, with my shovel stuck in the bank. I had my glove off and my hand on the moldboard, feeling the cold come up through the steel. I was catching my breath.

The sun was very bright on the snow. I remember that. I remember the whole valley white and quiet, and smoke going straight up from Hedvig’s chimney, and Dad leaning out of his seat, and Hedvig on her step with the thermos held out in both hands.

Then I heard a truck coming over the hill on the town road.

I knew the sound before I saw it. Troy’s three-quarter-ton has a hole in the exhaust that he has been meaning to fix since summer. It came up the road from the direction of the county highway, taking the back way over the ridge into town, and on the front of it, raised up on the push frame, was Dad’s old blade.

He was headed to a paying job. I learned later it was a dentist’s office in Viroqua that had called him for its parking lot.

He came along the road at about thirty. Then he got to the end of Hedvig’s lane, and he slowed.

I watched him look down the lane. Fresh plowed, clean to the gravel, a quarter mile of it. Then the tractor at the bottom, and Dad on it, and Hedvig on her step with the thermos, and me at the blade.

Then I watched his head turn, and look back up the road the way he had come. Six more lanes. All of them open, clean, the snow rolled up in neat banks on both sides. Mailboxes dug out. Smoke going up from every chimney.

Then he looked at Dad.

His truck stopped in the road.

Dad set the brake a little harder, though it was already set. He did not say anything.

Troy opened his door.

He got out and stood by his truck for a second with one hand on the door, the way a man does when he has not decided yet what he is going to do. Then he shut it and started walking down Hedvig’s lane.

It is a quarter mile. It takes a while to walk a quarter mile in work boots on fresh-plowed gravel with three people watching you come. I did not move from where I stood. Hedvig did not move. Dad sat on his tractor and drank nothing and waited.

When Troy got close, I could see his face. He was not angry. I had been ready for angry. He looked like a man who had been hit hard somewhere he could not point to.

He stopped about ten feet from the tractor. He looked at the blade. He looked at it a long time, the tank steel and the grader edge and every bead I had run.

“You made this,” he said to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“From what?”

“Scrap,” I said. “An old grader edge. The diesel tank behind my shop.”

He nodded. He put his hands in his coat pockets and took them out again.

“When?”

“The Saturday after you hung up on me,” I said. I did not say it hard. I said it the way you would tell somebody the date of a funeral.