The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

The man who did it

Clint Rasmusson is forty-eight. He runs the biggest flatwork crew in our end of the Red River Valley, six men and two trucks, basement floors, driveways, machine shed slabs for the farmers out toward Rothsay.

He is good at it. I will say that about him as long as I live.

We married when I was twenty-four. He was a good finisher and a hard worker, and for a while we ran one crew together under his name.

Then we stopped being able to stand in the same kitchen, and when Brody was five, I took my dad’s old equipment and started over with my own.

Clint’s father had a concrete business too. It went under when Clint was twenty.

His dad had a heart attack at fifty-two, the bank came for the trucks, and Clint watched them get loaded on a flatbed and hauled to an auction in Moorhead.

He never got over that. I understood it, even when I could not live with it.

He built his crew back from one mixer and a borrowed wheelbarrow, and from the day Brody was born, Clint talked about the day the boy would run it.

Brody worked for both of us summers, starting when he was thirteen. He picked up rebar for his dad and pushed wheelbarrows for me.

When he graduated, he came to my shop on a Monday morning and asked if I would teach him to finish.

He did not say why, and I did not ask. But the summer before, he had been on his dad’s crew when a man named Anders got chewed out in front of a homeowner for a joint that was a quarter inch off line.

Brody told me about it at supper and did not eat the rest of his plate.

The same fall Brody turned eighteen, he went to the courthouse in Fergus Falls and filed to take my family name.

He paid the filing fee, close to three hundred dollars, out of his lawn mowing money. He said it was his grandpa Halvorsen’s name, and his grandpa had taught him to tie his boots.

Clint found out from somebody at the lumberyard. He did not speak to Brody for four months.

When he finally did, it was to tell him that any fool could swing a trowel, and it took a real man to make payroll for six families.

So when I saw those ruts on Elm Street, I knew exactly what I was looking at. It was not about a sidewalk.

It was a man who could not stand to see his son’s name on a job that did not have his name next to it.