The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

Burl

Burl came at two o’clock, the way he said he would.

He is eighty-one years old. He worked the taconite mine for thirty-eight years and then cut firewood for half the county until his back said no.

Now he only cuts for himself, and he heats his whole house with it.

His log splitter had blown a seal on the hydraulic cylinder in September.

Emmett had rebuilt the cylinder and machined a new rod end, because the old one was scored too bad to save. Burl needed it back before the snow.

He came up the township road in his old Chevy with his flat trailer behind, and he slowed when he saw the rocks, and then he stopped right there in the road with his flashers on.

I walked out to him. He rolled the window down, and his face was so confused it about broke my heart. “Corinna,” he said, “did you folks have a rock slide?”

“Something like that,” I said.

He looked over at Lorene’s house. He has known that family since before Emmett was born. He did not say anything about it, and I loved him a little for that.

He tried to be helpful. That is the kind of man he is.

He said he would back the trailer up along the ditch a ways and turn around in our hayfield gate down the road, so he was out of the traffic.

There is not much traffic on that road, but a milk truck comes through at three, and Burl did not want to be in its way.

So he started backing, slow, with his head out the window and his arm over the seat.

He got about a hundred feet before the right trailer tire found the soft shoulder. The ditch had been full of water all September.

The tire slid off the edge and the trailer tipped and the whole rig stopped dead.

Emmett ran. I ran behind him. By the time we got there Burl was out of the truck, standing in the cold wind in his flannel shirt, with no coat, looking down at his trailer wheel buried to the hub.

“I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m so sorry, Emmett. I’m an old fool. I should have walked in and let you carry it out.”

He was apologizing to us. That is the part I could not get over.

An eighty-one-year-old man standing in a ditch with his hands shaking, apologizing to us for a pile of rocks he did not put there.

I went and got my bottle jack and two pieces of plank from my own truck, and Emmett and I jacked that trailer up and cribbed it and got the wheel back on solid ground. It took most of an hour.

Then Emmett walked back to the shop, climbed over the riprap with the splitter cylinder on his shoulder, came back for the rod end, and came back again for the hoses and the box of fittings.

Three trips, climbing over those rocks. He is fifty years old with a bad knee from a softball game in 1998. He did not say a word about it.

We loaded Burl up, and I took my own coat off and put it around his shoulders, and he drove off slow with his flashers still blinking.

I stood in the road and watched until he made the curve.

When I turned around, Lorene’s kitchen curtain was open about two inches. Then it closed.