The Propane Route My Cousin Locked Up

And behind them, all along the road shoulder and pulled up in the yard, there were pickups.

I counted them from the road before I turned in. Eleven. Eleven trucks and cars, idling in the cold with their exhaust going straight up, and people standing beside them in their barn coats and stocking caps. I knew every one of them. They were on my route.

The old dairy farmer from my first stop was there. The retired logger was there. A couple from the hobby farm was there.

Tove Lindahl was there in her husband’s canvas coat, with the baby in the car seat behind her and her mother watching the other two.

And the widow from the lake place was there. Ninety-one, in a car her grandson had driven her out in, with the window rolled down two inches so she could hear.

I parked at the edge of the road. Einar and I got out. Nobody looked at us much. They were all looking at the man with the clipboard.

The dairy farmer was the one who walked over to him. He did not raise his voice.

He just walked up, took his glove off, and shook the man’s hand like a neighbor.

“You’re the one buying the gas business,” he said.

The man said he was hoping to, yes sir.

“I farm out on the county road,” he said. “I’ve bought my propane from this outfit since 1983. So have most of these folks. We wanted to come out and tell you, so you’d know before you sign anything.”

He looked over at Knute, and then back at the man from Duluth, and he said it plain, the way you would tell somebody the price of hay.

“Wherever Marit buys her propane, that’s where we buy ours. If she’s driving for you, fine. If she’s not, we’ll follow her. That’s eleven of us here. There’d be more, but it’s cold.”

The man from Duluth looked at the pickups. He looked at the old widow in her car with the window down. He looked at Tove.

He looked at Einar standing beside me with his ear flaps down, and then at me, and I think he knew who I was.

Then he looked at Knute.

“Is this the driver you told me about,” he said. “The one you said would come along with the route.”

Knute did not answer. He just stood there in his own yard in the cold.

The man from Duluth was quiet for a while. Then he tucked his clipboard under his arm and said, politely, to nobody in particular, that he thought his company was going to need some more time to look at this.

That it seemed like the customer list might not be what he had been told.

He shook Knute’s hand. He shook the dairy farmer’s hand. He nodded at the rest of us and got into his clean silver pickup and backed it carefully out of the yard and drove away down the lake road toward the highway, and it was so cold and so still that we could hear his tires on the frozen gravel for a long way.

Nobody cheered. That is not how people are up here. One by one they got back in their trucks and started heading home.

Tove waved at me through her windshield. The widow’s grandson rolled her window up and she lifted one mittened hand.

In two minutes the yard was empty except for Knute, and me, and Einar.