The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

The chain was new. That is the first thing I noticed, standing at the plant gate at a quarter to seven on a Wednesday morning with my thermos in one hand and the truck keys in the other.

It was a bright galvanized chain, the kind you buy by the foot at the hardware store in Virginia, wrapped three times through the handle of the liquid outlet valve on our big storage tank and closed with a brass padlock.

The tag was still on the padlock. A little cardboard tag on a string, swinging in the wind coming off the swamp behind the plant, like he had bought it on the way over and had not even bothered to tear it off.

Our grandfather built that plant in 1971. It is not much to look at: one 18,000-gallon storage tank on concrete saddles, a loading riser, a little block office with a coffee pot, and a gravel yard big enough to turn a truck around.

Behind the office sat our bobtail, a white delivery truck with a 3,200-gallon tank on the back and a hose reel on the rear.

I had driven that truck for nineteen years, ever since Einar’s knees quit and Grandpa handed me the keys.

I set my thermos on the hood and walked all the way around the tank, as if there might be some other explanation.

There was not. The vapor line was chained too. Without those two valves open, I could not put one gallon into my truck.

A hard cold was coming down out of Canada on Friday night, the first real freeze of the year, with Saturday morning forecast at four below.

And I had twenty-six customers under twenty percent.

Twenty-six tanks, most of them farms out on the county roads between Cook and Angora, and almost all of them heating houses with people in them.

I called Knute. On the third try he picked up and said my name like he had been waiting for it.

“I see you found it,” he said.

“Knute, I have twenty-six tanks under twenty percent and a freeze on Friday. Take the chain off. We can argue about everything else after Saturday.”

“We can argue about it now,” he said. “The man from Duluth is coming Saturday morning to sign. You can either sign with me, or you can stand there and look at that tank. Those are your two choices, Marit.”

He hung up before I could answer. I stood there in the cold with the phone against my ear, listening to nothing, and watched the sun come up red over the spruce at the edge of the yard.

Knute Kittelson is my mother’s sister’s boy, six years older than me.

When Grandpa died two years ago, he left the plant and the truck and the route to the two of us, half and half, in a will he had written out at the kitchen table in Cook.

Grandpa’s idea was that I would run it and Knute would get a check twice a year, and for a while that is exactly how it went.

Then, last spring, a regional dealer out of Duluth started buying up the small outfits on the Range.

Their man came and found Knute, and Knute came and found me.

The offer was $410,000 for everything: the plant, the truck, the tank leases, and all 140 customers.

Split two ways, that was a lot of money to a man in Knute’s position. I knew it was a lot of money to me, too.