The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

What Merna did

I did not tell anybody what Gordie had done. Not my sister. Not my mother. Not the men at the feed store. I told Winnie, and I told Merna only because she asked.

But Merna Shue drives a route. Every weekday she picks up fourteen or fifteen people across the Tug Hill and down into Lowville and Watertown.

Dialysis, chemo, eye doctors, the physical therapy place. They are old, mostly, and they talk.

Merna told the story at every stop on her route that day, and the next day, and the day after that. She did not make it bigger than it was. She did not have to.

“Twice,” she would say. “He came back down that road twice, with Fern Yancey’s van due at eight. And Rollin went back and dug every one of them out again.”

By the weekend, the story had gone around the hill and down into the village and back up again.

People knew it at church on Sunday. People knew it at the diner on the state road. I did not say one word.

Winnie said to me that Sunday after service, “Everybody is looking at you.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to say anything to Gordie?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I thought about it. Then I said, “Because I’d say it wrong.”

Alton

Alton Rhinehart came by the garage on Tuesday afternoon while I was putting new cutting edges on the plow.

A V-plow wears its edges fast on hill roads with gravel under the snow, and I had worn mine down to the bolts.

Alton is seventy-four. He worked thirty-five years for the state highway department himself, driving plow, so he knows the difference between winging back and what Gordie did better than I do.

He stood in the garage door with his hands in his pockets and watched me torque the bolts for a while.

“Your cousin’s been spoken to,” he said.

“By who?”

“By nobody official. By his own mother, I hear. And by Lavern at the post office, in front of six people.”

I did not say anything. I kept working.

“I don’t like what he did,” Alton said. “But I’ll tell you something, Rollin. I knew his father. I knew yours. I was there the winter he lost those drives. That boy thinks you took his living.”

“I didn’t take anything. They came to me.”

“I know that. I’m one of them. I’m telling you what’s in his head, not what’s true.” He kicked a little snow off his boot. “When’s the next storm?”

“Weather radio says Thursday night. Lake band. Could be eighteen, twenty inches.”

Alton nodded. He looked at me a long time. Then he said, “All right,” and went home. I did not know what he meant by it.