The Cowbell at the Last Hill

Four in the morning

The frost on the windshield was thick as a thumb. I scraped it while the old Ford idled, and the cold came up through my boots, and my breath hung in the yard light.

Marlene came out in her red fleece, carrying a thermos in one hand and a paper sack in the other. She had been up since half past two. I knew because I had heard the oven.

Nathan came out last, hood up, a bag over his shoulder, his racing shoes tied together by the laces and hung around his neck. He looked like a boy walking to a doctor’s office.

Marlene unwrapped a biscuit and pressed it into his hand, sausage, still warm, in a paper towel. “Eat that,” she said. “Every bite, now, not on the course.”

He held it a long moment before he took a bite. Then he ate the whole thing looking straight ahead, the way you eat when your throat is tight.

The three of us fit across the bench seat the way we had when he was small and we took him to the county fair. Nathan in the middle, Marlene against the door, me driving. We went north in the dark with the heater roaring and not doing much.

For the first hour nobody talked. Marlene poured coffee into the thermos lid and handed it to me, every few miles, without a word.

Somewhere past the second hour, with the sky going gray at the edges, Nathan said, “I didn’t think he’d really say it. About quitting. Is he right?”

I took my time. The road ran straight and flat for a long way before it began to roll.

“A boy who gets up at five in the morning and runs a gravel road alone in the dark, with frost on it, for nobody watching? That boy is the opposite of a quitter.”

“He didn’t see me do it.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t. That’s on him, not on you.”

I did not say what I was thinking, which was that I knew exactly how a man could miss all of that, because I had. Marlene put her hand on his sleeve and left it there. She held that sweatshirt sleeve almost the whole rest of the way, with two fingers, like she was afraid he would float off.

At the last gas station Nathan went in and bought three bananas and handed one to each of us. “I’m not being quiet because I’m mad,” he said. “I’m keeping it all in so I can use it later.”

“Use it later,” I said. I looked at him in the rearview mirror, a boy in a gray hood eating a banana, and I thought: nobody taught him to carry a thing until it is time.