The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

He walked. He went down the fence line with the cup out in front of him like he was carrying a candle in church, past the trucks, past the burn barrel, past the parents who had all stopped talking to watch.

I followed about twenty feet behind. Kurt stayed at the top. I could feel him watching, and I could feel the whole hill watching, and I did not care. I only watched my boy.

Bodie got to the truck and stood by the driver’s door. It was too high for him.

He held the cup up as high as his arms would go and waited. He did not knock.

For a second I thought Orvin was going to drive away. I saw his hand on the shifter.

Then the window came down, slow, the old crank kind, and Orvin looked down at my son.

“I brought you cocoa,” Bodie said. “It’s from our thermos. It’s still hot.”

Orvin did not take it right away. He looked at the cup, and he looked at Bodie, and then he looked past him up the hill at all of it, the kids, the barrel, the line of trucks. His chin was shaking.

Then he reached down and took the cup in his bare hand. His hand was shaking too. He held it and did not drink it.

“I’m sorry I broke your post,” Bodie said. “I said it before, but I wanted to say it again.”

Orvin made a sound I did not expect. It was not a word. It was the sound a man makes when something gets through.

He set the cup on the dash, and he put his hand over his eyes, and he sat there.

I came up then and stood beside Bodie. I put my hand on his shoulder. I did not say anything. I did not know what there was to say.

After a while Orvin took his hand away. His eyes were wet. He looked at me and not at Bodie when he spoke, and his voice was rough.

“My wife’s in the home in Thief River,” he said. “Since October. Ardis. You probably heard.”

I had heard. Ardis Kask had played the piano at our church for thirty years, until her hands got too unsteady.

Then her memory went. I had not known it had come to the care home.

“I was up there Christmas Day,” he said. “All morning. She didn’t know me. She thought I was her brother. She asked me when Orvin was coming to get her.”

He stopped. I waited.

“That corner post,” he said. “We set it two summers ago. The old one rotted out. I dug the hole and she held the post straight and told me when it was plumb. She said I always set them crooked.”

He laughed, a little, and then it went out of him.

“That was the last one she helped me with,” he said. “Last thing we did together on the place. I came home from the home Christmas Day and the first thing I saw from the road was that post laying over.”

Bodie looked up at me. I squeezed his shoulder.

“I didn’t sleep that night,” Orvin said. “And the next morning I went out and did that. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it. I kept going. I don’t know why I kept going.”

“Because you were hurting,” I said.

“That’s not a reason,” he said. “That’s not a reason to take a hill away from a bunch of kids. Forty years I let them on it. Forty years. And I took it away over a post.”