The Lane I Plowed First

The first storm

The first big snow after the funeral came on the twenty-sixth of November, eleven inches overnight with a hard wind behind it. I stood in my yard at three in the morning and looked east.

Across the field and the cedars, Elwin’s yard light was on, and under it lay an old man’s lane with eleven inches in it.

He was sixty-six, alone for the first time in a house he had lived in his whole life, with a quarter mile of lane and a Farmall with a bad starter.

I told myself it was Christian. I told myself it was what anybody would do for a widower in a storm. That was the first lie.

The second lie was that I did it out of kindness.

I did it to be seen.

I want to say this plainly, because it took a boy of fifteen and a barn wall for me to say it to myself.

I plowed that lane in the straightest passes I knew how to make, and I turned in his yard and flashed my lights once across his kitchen window, and I drove off, and I never knocked.

I wanted him to wake up and see the lane open and know whose blade had done it. I wanted him ashamed. And I wanted, God help me, the wave.

If I got the wave, I told myself, that would be the apology. I never asked who was supposed to be apologizing.

That week at the Co-op counter, and again in the fellowship hall, I let it be known, modestly, the way a man does when he wants you to ask.

“Plowed Elwin’s lane out before my own this morning,” I said. Somebody said, “That’s a good neighbor, Burdette.” Somebody said, “After what he put you through.” That is what I wanted to hear.

I did it every storm after that, in my own pickup, on my own diesel, before my county shift ever began. Seven winters, every snow over three inches, my own pickup to Elwin’s first, then the county route, fourteen miles of it, then home.

That makes fifty-four storms, counting the one I am telling you about, and I never missed one.

And every storm I turned at the bottom of his yard, looked straight ahead at nothing, and drove off, and he never waved.

I kept the count the way a man keeps a debt somebody owes him. Fifty-three plowings, and the fifty-fourth waiting on me that night.

I thought I was keeping a record of my goodness. What I was keeping was a grudge with a snowplow on the front of it.

The porch

So that February morning, with the dog howling in the window, I walked up Elwin’s steps.

I knew every board of them by sight, and I had never set a boot on one. The railing was new. The snow on the top step was untracked.

Nobody had gone in or out since the wind came up.

The kitchen door was not locked. Nobody locks a door in Cahill, Minnesota, and Elwin least of all. The warm air that came out smelled of coffee left too long on the burner, and of the dog, and of something I knew from sitting up with my own father at the end.

It is the smell of a house where something has gone wrong in the night.

He was on the kitchen floor beside the table.

He lay on his right side with one arm under him and the other hand stretched toward the wall phone. It was the old kind, mounted by the pantry door, with a long coiled cord, and the receiver was off the hook on the linoleum and the line dead from being off so long.

Elwin had dragged himself maybe six feet. Behind him was a smear on the floor where his knee had pushed. His eyes were open. His cap was still on.

I said, “Elwin,” in a voice I did not know I owned.

He turned his head. The right side of his face had fallen, eye and mouth both, like candle wax. He looked at me and I could see him know me.

I could see him try to say something, and what came out was a sound with no shape.

I knelt on the floor of his house and took his hand, which was cold as a pump handle.

“I got you,” I said. “I got you, Elwin.”

My hands shook so bad I had to dial twice. The dispatcher in Kerrick knew me, because the plow drivers are the voices on the radio all winter.

I told her I thought it was a stroke, and she said a unit was coming, nineteen minutes, the way the roads were.

“Tell them the lane is open,” I said. “To the door. I just did it. They can back right up to the steps.”

I heard myself say it. It was the truest thing I had ever said about that lane. Open to the door.

Elwin’s good eye held on mine. It was the first time that man had looked straight at me in ten years, and what I saw in it was not hate.

I had that picture wrong too. It was a man who had been lying on a cold floor for hours, listening for something.