The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

There were only three or four other kids out that afternoon, since it was Christmas and most families were still at their tables.

Bodie went down maybe a dozen times, each one faster than the last, yelling the whole way.

The sled was quicker than his old one. That was the trouble.

On the last run he hit a rut near the bottom and spun sideways, and he could not steer it, and it carried him off the packed run toward the fence.

There is a corner where Orvin’s fence turns at the bottom of the hill, and a big old cedar post holds that corner.

Bodie’s sled hit it square. I heard the crack from the top of the hill.

I was running before he started crying. That is the thing about being a mother. Your legs know before your head does.

I got to him in about fifteen seconds, which on a snowy hill in pac boots is moving.

He was more scared than hurt. He had bumped his knee and his chin was scraped, and he was crying the hard way little boys cry when they think they have done something terrible.

I held him and checked him over, his arms, his neck, his eyes.

Then I looked at the post. It had snapped clean off at the snow line.

The top half was leaning out over the field with the wire still stapled to it, holding it up at a crooked angle like a broken arm.

“Is he going to be mad?” Bodie asked me. His voice was small. “Mom, is Mr. Kask going to be mad at me?”

I told him we would go and tell him right now, the two of us, and say we were sorry, and offer to fix it.

That is what you do. You do not leave a broken thing for a neighbor to find.

Orvin’s farmhouse sat back from the hill behind a row of old spruce.

The walk was shoveled, but only one narrow path, the width of one man. His pickup was parked by the porch with snow still on the hood.

I knocked. It took him a long time to come. When he opened the door he was still in his coat and his good church shoes, and I realized he had only just got home from somewhere.

Bodie stood in front of me in his red snowsuit with his blue sled in his mittens.

He had stopped crying, but his face was red and wet, and he looked up at Orvin like he was standing in front of the principal.

“I broke your post,” he said. “I’m sorry. My sled went sideways and I couldn’t stop it.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and said that we would pay for the post, whatever it cost, and that Kurt would set a new one in the spring as soon as the frost came out of the ground.

Orvin did not say anything. He stepped out onto the porch in his church shoes and looked down the hill toward the corner where the post hung crooked over the snow. He looked at it for a long time.

I remember the sun was already getting low, the way it does up here in December by four o’clock, and it lit up the side of his face. He looked older than I had ever seen him look.

“Forty years,” he said. That was all. He said it to the post, not to us.

Then he turned around and went back inside and shut the door. Not hard. He did not slam it.