The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

Bodie went down that run more times than I could count, in his red snowsuit on his blue sled, flying, yelling, laughing, his hat coming off every third run.

Every time he got to the bottom he looked back up at me to make sure I had seen.

I had seen. Every single time.

It was about one in the afternoon when I saw the truck coming slow along the section road from the west.

I knew it before I could see who was in it. I knew it by how slow it was going.

It was Orvin. He was heading east, toward the county road, maybe to Thief River Falls, which is where the bigger stores are.

To get there from his place, he had to come right past our gate.

Except he could not get past our gate. The pickups had the whole shoulder full along our fence, and some were parked half on the road, and two kids were carrying sleds across from a truck on the other side.

So Orvin stopped. He had to. He sat there in his truck in the middle of the section road with the engine running and the exhaust curling up white in the cold air, waiting for the kids to cross.

They crossed. He did not drive on. He just sat there.

From the top of the run I could see him through his windshield.

He was looking up the rise, past the fence, past the trucks and the burn barrel, at all those kids coming down our hill.

He did not wave. He did not look away, either. People along the fence saw him.

I watched it go down the line, one head turning, then another, then a mother leaning over to say something to the woman next to her.

Nobody yelled at him. Nobody said a word to him. They just looked at him, and then they looked back at their kids, and that seemed to be worse than yelling.

I could see his face from two hundred feet and I could see that it was.

Kurt came up beside me at the top of the run. He had been running the skid steer between sessions, patching a soft spot near the creek, and he smelled like diesel and woodsmoke.

“Want me to go talk to him?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head. I did not know what I wanted. I knew I did not want anybody to go down there and make a scene in front of sixty kids.

And I knew I did not want to be the one who went down there and said, see what you did.

Then I felt a tug on my coat sleeve.

Bodie was standing next to me holding the green thermos from the truck.

His cheeks were red as his snowsuit and he had snot frozen on his upper lip, and he was looking down at the road.

“Mom,” he said. “Is that Mr. Kask?”

“Yes, bud.”

“Can I take him some cocoa? It’s cold out and he’s just sitting there.”

I looked at Orvin’s truck on the road. I looked at my boy.

I thought about the post and the manure and Bodie crying himself to sleep, and I thought, he has more Christian in him at seven than I do at thirty eight.

I unscrewed the cup off the top of the thermos, and I filled it, and I put it in his mittens.

I told him to hold it with both hands and walk, not run, and I would be right behind him.