The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

Friday

I called the bus garage at six the next morning and took a personal day.

My boss, a good man who has known me twenty-two years, did not even ask why. He just said, “Go do what you need to do, Corinna.”

Then I called Ike Halvorsen. Ike is sixty, lives a mile and a half east of us, and cuts hay and plows snow and does whatever else needs doing for half the township. He answered on the second ring.

“Ike,” I said, “I need to borrow your skid steer for a day and a half. Maybe two. I’ll pay you for the fuel and I’ll pay you for your time.”

“What happened?” he said. Then before I could answer, he said, “Never mind. I drove by last night. I’ll be there in an hour.”

He was there in forty minutes, with the yellow skid steer on his trailer behind his truck.

He unloaded it at the hayfield gate and handed me the key like he was handing me a casserole.

“You know how to run one of these?” he asked.

“I’ve run one in the bus yard every winter for ten years, pushing snow,” I said. “Never cut sod with one, though.”

“Same machine,” Ike said. “Keep the bucket flat and don’t get greedy. Take two inches at a time.”

Then I called the gravel pit out on the county road. The woman in the office has known Emmett since high school.

I told her eight loads of Class 5, tandem dumps, starting as soon as they could.

She said fourteen dollars a ton, and delivery was sixty-two dollars a load since we were close.

It came to eighteen hundred and forty dollars for the eight loads. I told her that was fine. She said the first truck could be there by ten.

Eighteen hundred and forty dollars was most of what we had saved for a new furnace.

Our old one is twenty-six years old and makes a sound like a coffee can of bolts every time it kicks on.

I thought about that while I stood at the fence. Then I thought about Burl standing in the ditch in his flannel shirt, and I decided the furnace could rattle one more winter.

The work

I pulled on my navy coveralls, the work ones with the cuffs gone soft, and pushed the sleeves up to my elbows.

I put on my orange gloves, the ones I keep for cold mornings at the garage, and I climbed into that skid steer.

It was the kind of October morning you get maybe four times a year up here. Clear, cold, not a breath of wind.

The birches along the fence had turned all the way yellow, and the sun came through them like it was coming through church glass.

I started at the hayfield gate. Ike stood and watched me make the first pass, and he said, “Flatter,” and I flattened the bucket, and he nodded and went back to his truck.

The sod came up in long strips, curling like carpet. Underneath it was the gravelly brown soil you get on high ground up here, good and firm.

I peeled it back and dumped it over the fence line into the field.

Emmett came behind me on his dad’s old Ford tractor, dragging the box blade to scrape and level what I had cut.

That tractor is a 1966 model. It smokes when it starts. It has never once let him down.

We did not talk much. We did not have to. We have been married twenty-four years, and you learn to work next to somebody the way you learn to sleep next to them, without bumping.

The first gravel truck came at ten-fifteen. The driver was a young man from the pit, maybe twenty-five, and he looked at the rocks across the old drive and then he looked at me in the skid steer and he did not ask a single question.

“Where do you want it?” he said.

“Start at the far end by the shop,” I said. “Spread it out as you come back toward the road, and I’ll push it.”