The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

He just closed it, and we stood there on his porch, and after a while I took Bodie’s hand and we walked home.

Bodie asked me the whole way home if Mr. Kask was mad.

I said I thought he was sad, and I did not know why, and we would give him a day. That was my mistake. I thought a day would help.

So that was the stripe I watched him spread from my yard the next morning.

I drove to work with my hands tight on the wheel, and I do not think I said ten words to anybody at the clinic until noon.

I am a vet tech three days a week at the clinic in town.

Mostly I hold dogs for shots, and I run the lab, and in calving season I help with pulls and sections. The doctor I work for has known Orvin all his life.

“I heard,” he said when I came in. Everybody had heard. One of the kids who had been on the hill Christmas afternoon had told his mother, and his mother had told the café, and the café is the radio in Hallock.

By noon three different people had asked me what I was going to do about it.

A woman who brought her cat in for stitches said I ought to call the county. A man waiting with his bird dog said I ought to call the sheriff.

I thought about it, standing in the back with my hands in a sink full of instruments. I thought about it all afternoon. And every time, I came back to the same thing.

It was his hill and his manure. He had every right to spread it there.

Arguing about it would only make the kids lose that hill twice, once to the manure and once to the fight, and the fight would last longer.

When I got home Kurt was standing at the end of our driveway with his arms crossed, looking across the road at the brown hill.

He had been out feeding cows and he still had hay in his collar.

“I’m going to go talk to him,” he said.

Kurt is 40, and he is a patient man with cattle and machinery and with me. He is not as patient with people who hurt children’s feelings. I could see his jaw working.

“Don’t,” I said. “Not today. He’s not going to take it back, Kurt. It’s frozen in. That hill is done till spring no matter what anybody says to him.”

“Bodie cried himself to sleep last night,” Kurt said. “Did you know that? I went in at ten and he was still awake, asking if it was his fault.”

“I know. I know he did.” I put my hand on his arm. “So let’s not make it worse for him. Let’s not make it a war he has to watch from his bedroom window.”

He stood there a minute longer. Then he said, “Fine,” the way men say fine when it is not fine, and he went back to the shop.

But I saw him look at the hill one more time before he went in.

That afternoon some kids came with their sleds anyway. They had not heard yet.

I watched from the kitchen as their parents pulled up along the road, got out, and stood there looking at the brown hill.

Nobody went up. You do not sled down a manure pile. A couple of the kids poked at the edge of it with their boots, and a dad said something, and they all got back in their trucks and drove away.