The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

Friday

By Friday morning, the story had been all the way around the plant, the lumberyard, the co-op and both cafes.

I know because Merit called me Thursday afternoon to tell me, and Merit does not call anybody unless a load is late.

“They’re talking about it in the scale house,” she said. “All of them. I just thought you ought to know. Gus didn’t say it twice. He didn’t have to.”

At seven o’clock Friday morning, there was a knock on the door of my shop. It was Anders, who had worked on Clint’s crew for twelve years.

Behind him was a quiet young man from Pelican Rapids who had been on the crew about a year.

Anders had his hat in his hands. He is fifty-three, a big gray-bearded man with a bad knee and the best edging hand I have ever seen besides my dad’s.

He looked at the floor of my shop a while before he said anything.

“I was in the scale house Wednesday,” he said. “I heard what Gus said. I have been thinking about it for two days.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’re hiring,” he said. “But I can’t go back to work for a man who’d do that to his own boy. I’ve got two boys of my own. I would like to work for somebody who teaches them instead.”

The young man behind him nodded. He did not say anything at all, but he did not have to.

I had not planned on hiring anybody until spring. I had not planned on a lot of things that week.

I looked at Brody, who was standing by the coffee pot, and he looked back at me, and I said yes to both of them.

That was the consequence, if you want to call it that. Nobody filed a report. Nobody sued anybody.

Clint lost the two best hands on his crew the week before the end of the season, and every contractor in the county knew why, and he had to stand in that scale house every morning and know that they knew.

Clint

Clint came to Elm Street on a Saturday, ten days after the second pour. It was a bright, cold noon with the last leaves blowing down the gutters.

Brody and I were there laying a strip of sod where the tires had torn up the boulevard grass.

I saw his pickup come around the corner, and I saw Brody see it.

Clint parked across the street, on the street, a good long way from the curb. Then he got out and walked over.

He looked older than he had a month before. I do not know if that was real, or if I was just looking at him differently.

He stopped at the end of the walk by the street and looked down the length of it to Ilse’s step.

He saw the corner. He walked up to it and looked down at his son’s initials and the date for a long time without saying anything. Then he took his wallet out of his back pocket.

“What did the second load cost?” he asked me.

“Ask him,” I said. “It’s his job.”

Clint looked at Brody. It was the first time I had seen him really look at our son since the boy was small. Brody did not look away.

“Keep it,” Brody said.

“I’m trying to make it right.”

“I know,” Brody said. “It’s already right. We made it right. Grandpa Rasmusson’s name was on his trucks, and your name is on yours, and mine’s on this corner. You could have been standing here with me when I signed it. That’s all I ever wanted.”

Clint put the wallet away. His jaw was working. For a minute I did not know if he was going to yell, or turn around and walk off, the way he had walked off from that scale house.

He did neither. He knelt down on the new concrete by the corner, slow, the way a man kneels whose knees have been on concrete for thirty years.

He ran his thumb over the broom lines. He looked at the joint by the corner and the edge, and I saw him check them the way any good finisher would.

“That’s a good walk,” he said, finally. He said it to the walk, not to us.

“It was a good walk the first time,” Brody said.

Clint closed his eyes. Then he nodded, once, and got up.

He did not apologize. Not that day. I am not going to pretend he did.

But before he got back in his pickup, he stopped by the curb and said, without turning around, “Your joints are straighter than mine were at nineteen.”

“We’re pouring her back step in April,” Brody said to his father’s back. “If you want to come see.”

Clint stood with his hand on the door of his pickup for a moment. Then he got in and drove away, slow, down the middle of Elm Street, nowhere near the curb.