The Lane I Plowed First

The ambulance

They came in nineteen minutes, two medics out of Kerrick, a young man named Torvald and a woman named Kalli who had been two years behind Joanne in school.

They backed the rig up Elwin’s lane in the wind with the lights going and stopped with the rear doors six feet from the bottom step.

Kalli asked me when he was last seen normal, and I said I didn’t know, I was only the neighbor. She looked up at me.

“The neighbor who plowed this lane at three in the morning in this wind,” she said. “Lucky for him. That cot would never have made it up this drive otherwise.”

They strapped him in, Elwin’s good hand gripping the rail like the side of a boat. Kalli said they were taking him to St. Anselm’s, forty minutes if the road held, and somebody ought to call Joanne.

I found her number on the refrigerator under a magnet, next to a school picture of Emmitt, gap-toothed, from some earlier year. I stood there with the ambulance lights turning on the ceiling and thought, this is the kitchen I have driven past for ten years with my eyes bolted forward.

Marcene’s gate

I called Joanne from the porch. Then I drove the county route, because that is what a plow driver does. There were fourteen miles of State Aid road to open for the school buses and the next ambulance, and I ran the whole route in a trance.

I got to St. Anselm’s at ten past eleven. Marcene was already in the waiting room.

I had called Marcene at ten past four from the cab, and she had said, “I’ll go in. I’ll call work.” She still had her Prairie View lanyard around her neck.

She stood and took my arms in both hands.

“It’s a clot, on the left side,” she said. “They say another few hours on that floor in that cold and we wouldn’t be talking about it. They said the road. They said whoever opened the lane.”

I nodded. I did not trust my voice.

“I had to dig out the gate myself this morning,” she said, just in passing, the way you tell somebody about a flat tire.

“Quarter to six, before I left. I got the coal shovel and broke through the windrow, because that wing of yours had thrown a ridge up to my knee. It took forty minutes. I’ve never had to do that.”

I said, “Ever?”

My wife looked at me. Something crossed her face that I had seen on her only twice, once when her father died and once at the funeral of a woman we had both loved.

“Not in a long time,” she said, very carefully.

I thought she was tired and talking nonsense. For thirty-one winters my own wing had thrown a ridge across my own gate on the first pass, and for the first twenty-four I swung back by at five and cleared it before Marcene left for work.

Then came the winter of Lorraine’s funeral, and my three o’clock trip to Elwin’s lane, and a route that started the other way, and I quit coming round.

Every storm since, I had come home to a clear gate and never wondered. I had been so busy watching one man not wave that I had not noticed what lay in front of my own face.

I opened my mouth to ask her. And Joanne came through the double doors from the elevator with her coat open and her eyes red, and behind her came the boy.