The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

The excuse I already knew

You might be wondering whether there was some honest reason a town plow would come back down the same road twice before sunrise.

There is a thing plow crews do called winging back.

After the road is open, a crew will come back and push the banks farther off the shoulder with the wing, so there is somewhere to put the next storm. It is a real thing and it matters.

But nobody wings back at five-thirty in the morning, twice, on one road, while the other town roads are still half-shut.

Winging back is for after the storm, when the roads are open everywhere. Ask any plow man on the Tug Hill.

And winging back does not mean dropping the wing into the end of every freshly plowed driveway.

A good driver lifts the wing at a drive mouth, the way you would lift your feet over a dog sleeping in a doorway.

Gordie is a good driver. That is the thing. He knows exactly how to lift that wing. He has done it ten thousand times.

Seven-forty

I opened the last one, a young couple’s drive out near the Beaver Meadow crossroad, at seven thirty-eight by my dashboard clock.

I sat there with the truck idling and finally poured myself a cup of coffee and drank half of it.

Thirty-one drives. An hour and thirty-four minutes. Call it three minutes a drive, counting the driving between.

The sun was full up by then, low and bright across the snow, the kind of winter morning sunlight that makes you squint even with your cap down.

Every bank on the Haskins Road glittered like it had been sugared.

I could have gone to the milk route then. I should have. But I kept thinking about that town truck making two passes, and I did not know if he was done.

So I drove back down to Fern’s.

I pulled to the side of the road just past the mouth of her drive, where I would not be in the van’s way, and I got out and stood beside my truck in the sun.

Fern at the door

Her drive was open clean to the gravel.

I had gone over it twice after the bank, both times in scoop, because Merna has to roll a wheelchair down it, and a wheelchair stops cold in two inches of slush.

Fern was standing in her storm door in her long navy wool coat, buttoned to the neck, with her white curly hair pinned the way she always pins it on treatment days.

She had her purse on her arm. She had been ready since seven.

I know that because she told me later. She said she always gets ready an hour early on treatment days because she is afraid of being the reason Merna is late for the next person.

That is the kind of woman Fern Yancey is. She was a school cook in the village for thirty-one years.

She fed me, and Gordie, and every kid on the hill, macaroni and cheese on Fridays and a sugar cookie if you said please.

At seven fifty-five, I heard the van before I saw it.

Then it came over the rise from the north, a white wheelchair van with the lights on, slow and careful the way Merna drives it.

I raised one gloved hand. Merna flashed her lights and turned in off the road and rolled up Fern’s drive like it was the middle of July.