The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

Gordie

Gordie and I grew up a quarter mile apart. His father and mine were brothers.

We hunted the same woods and baled the same hay and sat in the same pew at the Methodist church down in the village when our mothers made us.

Gordie is two years younger than me. He was the better ballplayer and the better mechanic, and for a long time I would have told you he was the better man, too.

Eleven winters ago, Gordie had the driveways on the Haskins Road.

He plowed them with his father’s old one-ton and a straight blade, and he charged by the push, sixty dollars a time after a big storm.

That was fine in a town where it plows eight times a winter. On the Tug Hill it plows twenty.

A widow with sixty dollars a push was looking at a twelve-hundred-dollar winter, and some of them were skipping their heating oil to pay it.

Alton Rhinehart came to me first. He is seventy-four now and was sixty-three then.

He asked me if I would plow his drive for the season, a flat price. I said yes. Then his neighbor asked, and her neighbor.

By the end of that winter, I had most of the Haskins Road, and Gordie had four drives left.

He sold his father’s truck in the spring and went on the town highway crew in the fall. He has driven the town plow ever since.

I never went looking for one of his customers. Not one. They came to me.

But I have learned that the truth does not matter much to a man who has decided what happened to him.

Gordie stopped talking to me that year. Not with a fight. Just quiet. He would nod at a funeral.

He would pass the potatoes at Thanksgiving if I was next to him and not look at me while he did it.

For eleven years I told myself he would come around. That is the kind of thing you tell yourself about family.