The Van Dad Drove to Church

I brought Dad home from the hospital in Valley City on a Tuesday afternoon in September.

He had been in eleven days with pneumonia, and he had lost fourteen pounds he did not have to lose.

He rode the whole way with his hands folded on his knees, watching the sunflower fields go by. Half of them were already turned brown and heavy, heads bowed, waiting on the combines.

“Good year for sunflowers,” he said, somewhere past the Sheyenne River bridge.

It was the most he had said since they let him out. I told him it was, and he nodded like that settled something.

When I pulled into his driveway, I watched him look for it. He did not say anything.

He just turned his head toward the empty spot by the garage where the van had sat for 22 years, and he kept looking.

There was a dry rectangle on the concrete where the oil had never dripped, because Dad changed the oil every three thousand miles and fixed every leak the week it started. That clean patch was all that was left.

“Where’s the van, Nils?” he said finally. His voice was still thin from the coughing. He said it quietly, the way a man asks where his reading glasses went.

I had known for four days, and I had practiced the answer the whole drive. It did not come out any better for the practice.

“Garrett sold it, Dad. Last Thursday. To a man from Jamestown, for thirty-five hundred dollars.”

Dad sat there with his seat belt still on. A grasshopper landed on the hood of my pickup and sat in the sun, and neither one of us moved for a while.

“Thirty-five hundred,” he said. “That van was worth more than that to the ladies.”

That was all he said about the money. He unbuckled, opened the door, and walked into his own house slow and careful, one hand on the porch rail, like a man walking into a house that might not be his anymore.

The van

I should tell you about the van, because nobody outside our town would understand why a grown man would look at an empty driveway like that.

It was a white Chevy Express, a twelve-passenger, a 2006 with a little over 230,000 miles on it.

It had a crack in the windshield on the passenger side that Dad called his weather line, and a bench seat in the back that smelled like Juicy Fruit and church bulletins.

Mom started the Sunday route. She used to pick up two or three of the older women in her Buick and bring them to the 10 o’clock service, because their husbands had passed and the town had no bus and no cab and no anything.

When Mom died, 22 years ago this spring, Dad had been retired from the grain elevator for about a year. He was sixty-four.

He sat in his kitchen for a month after the funeral, and I was afraid we were going to lose him too.

Then one Saturday he called me. “Your mother’s ladies,” he said. “Who’s been taking them to church?” Nobody had.

He bought the van the next week from a church camp in Minnesota that was getting a new one.

That first Sunday he picked up three women. By the end of that year it was five.

For most of the last fifteen years it has been six, and when one passes, another widow somehow ends up on the list by the next spring.

He did it every Sunday. He did it in thirty below and in blizzards when the county had not plowed yet, with a shovel in the back and a bag of kitty litter for the ice.

He did it one whole winter with his wrist in a cast, and we could not stop him.

He did not just honk. That was the thing. He got out at every house, walked up every walk, knocked on every door, and waited.

Then he walked each woman to the van on his arm and helped her up the step.

“A man ought to come to the door,” he told me once. “Your mother would skin me if she saw me honking at Theda Moen.”

So when Garrett sold that van, he did not sell a vehicle. He sold the one thing that got Dad out of bed every Sunday since Mom died.