The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

What I decided in the road

That night we ate supper standing at the counter because neither of us wanted to sit down. Emmett hardly ate.

He kept looking out the window toward the road, where you could not even see the rocks in the dark.

“I could call the sheriff,” he said finally. “Or that lawyer in town who did Mother’s papers. Get a surveyor out here. Find out once and for all where the line is.”

“How long does that take?” I asked.

He knew. I knew. A surveyor in October, with every hunting cabin on the Range wanting stakes before freeze-up, would be four or five weeks out.

Then the lawyers. Then her lawyer. Then a judge, maybe next summer.

And in the meantime, every customer Emmett had would be climbing over a rock pile or parking on the road.

Half of his work comes in on a trailer. Farm equipment, plow frames, a snowmobile trailer hitch, a skid steer bucket that needs new teeth.

They would go somewhere else. Maybe to the shop in Chisholm, maybe to the big outfit in Virginia. Some of them would come back in the spring and most of them would not.

“Even if we won,” I said, “we’d lose. We’d lose a year of work fighting over six feet of gravel we don’t even need.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean we don’t need it?”

I went to the junk drawer and got a pencil and the back of the propane bill.

I drew the road, and the drive, and the shop, and our house, and then I drew the wire fence that runs along the east side of our hayfield.

That fence has been there since Emmett’s grandfather. It is ours on both sides of it for thirty feet.

It runs straight back from the old hayfield gate on the township road, about forty yards down from the mailboxes.

The hayfield gate already had an approach and a culvert, put in years ago so they could get the baler in.

Nobody had used it since his mother quit having the field cut. It was just grown over with quack grass and goldenrod.

“Three hundred feet,” I said. “From that gate along the fence to the yard. It’s flat. It’s high ground. It drains toward the ditch. We put a new drive in right there on our own land, and she can keep her six feet and every rock on it.”

Emmett did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, “That’s a lot of gravel.”

“It’s eight loads,” I said. “Maybe nine. I already did the math on the way home.”

That was true. I do a lot of math in my head on the way home.

You learn to, working on buses, where you are always figuring how much a part costs and how long the district will let a bus sit.

A drive twelve feet wide and three hundred feet long, with six inches of Class 5 on it, is about sixty-seven yards.

Call it ninety-some tons once it packs. A tandem dump carries twelve tons, so eight loads, with a little to spare.

“And who’s going to spread it?” Emmett asked.

“Ike’s got a skid steer,” I said. “And you’ve got your dad’s tractor and the box blade.”

He started to smile. It was the first time I had seen him smile all day, and it was a tired, crooked smile, but it was real.

“You know Lorene’s going to stand at that window and watch every minute of it,” he said.

“Let her watch,” I said. “She can’t say a thing about it. It’s our dirt.”