The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

“I was telling him somebody locked up the gas plant and you were driving to the Falls and back to get us filled. And they got up early and did that before I could stop them.”

I did not trust myself to say anything, so I knelt down in the frost in front of that tank, in front of those two kids in their pajamas and snow boots, and I put my arms around both of them at once.

The boy said, into my coat, “Is it going to be four below tomorrow?”

“That’s what the radio says,” I said.

“Is our house going to be warm?”

“Your house is going to be warm,” I said. “I promise you.”

Then I got up and wiped my face with the back of my glove and went to work.

I pulled the hose off the reel and walked it out to the tank, careful not to drag it across the chalk. I opened the dome. The gauge read nine.

I clamped the nozzle on the fill valve and went back and started the pump, and then I stood by the tank in the bright cold sun with my hand on the hose and watched that needle climb.

Nine. Fifteen. Thirty. Forty. Tove stood behind me on the drive with the baby, and nobody said anything.

I gave the Lindahl tank everything I had left on the truck. It was a little over three hundred gallons.

When I shut the pump down, the needle sat at seventy. That would carry that house to Christmas, cold snap or not.

Tove came over and hugged me hard, with the baby squashed between us.

And she said, “How much do I owe you,” and I said, “Same as always, on your budget plan,” and she started crying again, and so did I, and the kids looked at the two of us like we had both lost our minds.

Before I left I gave Tove the cardamom bread that Inga had sent, still in its dish towel, and told the kids it was from an old lady who used to drive their road.

The girl wanted to know if the old lady had a ponytail too. I said no, but she used to.

I drove the bobtail back to the chained plant with the tank empty, and I parked it, and I went home and slept for eleven hours.

The cold came down out of Canada that night just like they said it would. By dawn on Saturday it was four below in Cook.

And every one of the twenty-six houses on my list was warm.

I did not plan to go to Knute’s on Saturday. I did not call anyone, and I did not ask anyone to be there.

But Einar called me at eight thirty Saturday morning and said, “You going over there?” and I said no, and he said, “Well, I am. Come pick me up. I’m not driving in this cold.”

So at a quarter to ten, I picked him up, in my own pickup this time, and we drove out to Knute’s place on the lake road.

It was a bright, hard, still morning, so cold the air hurt your teeth, with the sun glittering on every inch of frost.

Knute’s house is a nice log place he built when the boat motor business was good.

There was a clean silver pickup in the yard with a dealer’s plate frame from Duluth, and a man in a new tan canvas coat standing beside it with a clipboard, talking to Knute.