The Lane I Plowed First

The winter after

It snowed the first week of November that year, the first big one. Seven inches, slow and wet and heavy, bending the cedars over.

The scanner went at a quarter past two, and I was already awake. I dressed in the dark and went out to the Ford.

I plowed Elwin’s lane first. Not to be seen. I would like to say that out loud, the way I said the rest to him.

I plowed it first because he had therapy at Prairie View twice a week and I wanted him able to get out. It is a different thing to plow a lane when you want something for it and when you don’t.

The blade does not change. The man does.

There was a boy in the passenger seat. Joanne had said yes, a Saturday, a thermos, home by seven. Emmitt rode with his knees up and his jacket zipped to the chin and said nothing for the first mile, which showed more manners than most grown men I know.

The yard light was on. I want that said. It threw its cold yellow circle on the new snow, and the kitchen light was on, and the dog was in the window wagging his whole back end.

I made my turn in the yard. And at the bottom of the loop I did not look straight ahead.

The porch light came on. The door opened, and Elwin Tollefson stood in it with his cane in his left hand and a blanket around his shoulders and the cold pouring in around him.

He had no business being on his feet at three in the morning. Joanne’s shape stood behind him in the dark hall, hands out, ready to catch him.

He lifted his hand off the door frame.

Four fingers. Up. He held it there.

I put the truck in park and got down. I climbed the steps I had stood on exactly once in ten years, and the new railing was cold and solid under my hand, and I stood on his porch in the falling snow and put my own hand up.

We stood like that, the two of us, for what felt like a month and was probably ten seconds. Then he said, with great effort, in a voice like a gate hinge, “Coffee.”

“I’ve got a thermos,” I said.

“Mine’s. Better.”

It was. It always had been.

Before I took the truck on to the shop, Emmitt and I stopped at my gate. He had brought the Folgers can of salt and his grandfather’s scoop shovel.

I broke the ridge my own wing had left, and he salted the gravel behind me, and we stood by the cedars where a path had once been packed along the fence, a path I had told myself every winter was deer.

I used to think a clear gate was a thing nobody had to thank anyone for. I know better now.

That evening Marcene set Lorraine’s pie plate on the counter, the one that had sat on the shelf by the door for ten years. It was full of rhubarb crisp from last summer’s freezer.

“That’s for Elwin’s supper,” she said. “You can carry it.”

I carried the plate out to the truck with both hands and drove the quarter mile east in the early dark with a warm dish on the seat beside me.

It had taken me seven winters, fifty-four storms, and a stroke that nearly killed my oldest friend. I climbed the steps and knocked like a man who had finally learned what a knock was for, and from the other side of the door I heard the dog, and the cane, and Elwin Tollefson’s voice calling out, slow and plain and glad:

“Door’s open, Burd. It always was.”