Emmitt
He was fifteen, six feet tall already, in a Cahill hockey jacket with the sleeves too short, with his grandfather’s long careful face. He went right to Marcene, and she opened her arms without a word, and he put his face in the shoulder of her scrubs and shook. Then he saw me over her shoulder.
“Mom said you found him. You plowed the lane.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. “Grandpa gets up for the plow, you know. When it storms. I was supposed to be out there this weekend, but there was the tournament.”
His voice cracked. “If I’d been there I’d have heard him fall.”
“He gets up for the plow,” he said again, to me, as if I might not understand. “He listens to the scanner. He says, Truck 14’s out, and then he’s got forty minutes.”
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I sat down on a plastic chair, because my legs had decided it. “What do you mean, he gets up for the plow?”
He looked at Marcene, and I saw my wife close her eyes, a short close, the way you do when something you have been holding finally goes out of your hands.
“For the gate,” Emmitt said, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. “He does your gate.”
I said, “My what?”
“Your gate, Mr. Hoyle. At the road. Your plow throws a pile across it. Every storm since I was eight, he listens for you to pass, and he waits till you’re gone, and then he gets his coat on and the Folgers can with the salt in it and the big scoop shovel, and he walks down the fence.”
The boy swallowed. “The fence between your place and ours. There’s a path. He shovels the path first, all the way, and then he does your gate. He clears it wide enough for Mrs. Hoyle’s car and salts it so she doesn’t slide when she turns. And then he goes back.”
“Since the first storm after Grandma died. He saw Mrs. Hoyle come out in the dark in her scrubs, digging out the gate with a dishpan.”
Emmitt almost smiled. “He said it was the stupidest thing he ever saw, and Grandma would never forgive him if he stood at the window and watched. So he went out with his shovel. He told Mrs. Hoyle not to say anything. He said it wasn’t for you.”
“It was for her. For Grandma’s friend.” The boy looked down at his boots, wet from the lot. “But I think it was for you too, Mr. Hoyle. I think it was for everybody.”