The Thirty One Driveways on Haskins Road

Thursday night

The band came in off the lake Thursday about four in the afternoon, and by dark it was coming down two and three inches an hour.

On the Tug Hill a lake band sits on you like a lid. You cannot see your mailbox from your porch.

It quit around two in the morning. Nineteen inches at our place by the stake in the yard.

The town truck came through the Haskins Road at four, the regular pass, the way it is supposed to.

I waited for it, then I went out at four-thirty and opened all thirty-eight of my drives by a quarter past seven.

It was a Friday. A dialysis day. Fern’s van at eight. Her drive was the first one I did and I went back and checked it again at a quarter to eight.

It was clean. Merna came at eight sharp and took her down the hill.

I went home and ate breakfast. I was going to the milk route late again, because the farms were slow opening their lanes and the dispatcher had said ten.

At nine-fifteen, my phone rang. It was Alton.

“Rollin,” he said, “you’ll want to come sit at the top of the Haskins Road for a while.”

“What for?”

“Just come on up. Park at the top where you can see down. Bring your coffee.”

The top of the road

I drove up and parked at the top of the hill on the shoulder, the same place where I had sat nine days before and looked down at thirty-one buried driveways.

It was a bright morning. The band had blown out and taken every cloud with it, and the sun was well up, low and white over the snow.

You could see all the way down the Haskins Road to the cedar swamp and past it to the Beaver Meadow crossroad.

And at the end of every one of my driveways, there was a person standing in the sun.

Alton at the end of his. The son and his mother at theirs, side by side. Lavern at hers, in a red snowsuit that must have been forty years old.

The young couple out by the crossroad, with their little boy between them in a snowsuit, holding a toy shovel.

Every one of them had a shovel. Snow shovels, coal shovels, one or two grain scoops.

They were not doing anything with them. They were just standing there, holding them, at the ends of their driveways, in the daylight.

Thirty-one drives. I counted. Some had two people. One had four. Where somebody was too frail to stand out in it, a neighbor or a grandson stood in their place.

At Fern Yancey’s drive there was nobody standing, because Fern was in Watertown in her chair.

But somebody had set a kitchen chair at the end of her drive, right at the mouth, with a shovel leaned against it.

I sat in my truck and I could not drink my coffee. I just held it.