The Lane I Plowed First

What I did not say

My wife sat very still with her hands knotted in her lap. I looked at her.

“He asked me not to tell you,” Marcene said to her knotted hands. “The first time. And then it was a month, and then a year, and every time I thought about telling you I thought about what you’d do.

“You’d have gone out there with that jaw of yours and made it about the fence. He would have stopped, because he’s as stubborn as you are, and I’d have been digging out that gate with a dishpan till I retired.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you. I’ve thought about it every storm for seven winters.”

Here is the part I am least proud of. For about one breath, I got angry. It rose from the same place the fence had come from, hot and old: you kept this from me, the both of you, for years.

Then I looked at Emmitt’s wet boots and at the lanyard around my wife’s neck, and I saw what I had been about to do.

I had been about to take the one thing Elwin Tollefson and my wife had ever done for me in the dark, without credit, and turn it into one more thing done to me.

That was the whole man I had been. A man who could be handed a kindness and find the insult in it.

“Emmitt,” I said. “Why didn’t he wave?”

The boy looked up. “I asked him that once.”

“What did he say?”

“He said you know what you owe him.” Emmitt shrugged inside the hockey jacket. “He said the day you say it out loud, he’ll wave, and not before. I said, Grandpa, he plows your lane every storm. And he said that wasn’t the same. He said a man can push snow around all winter and still not say the one thing.”

He paused. “He said you’d get there. He said, Burdette Hoyle is not a bad man, he’s just a slow one.”

I laughed. God forgive me, I laughed, a short ugly bark in the middle of St. Anselm’s waiting room. Then I put my face in my hands, and Marcene’s hand came down on my back and stayed, the way it had come down on a thousand nights.

“You’ve seen the barn wall,” Emmitt said, quieter. “Right?”

The barn wall

I had seen it, every day, from the road. The south wall of the Tollefson barn faces Hoyle Road, and about seven winters ago a column of chalk marks had started to appear on the red boards beside the big sliding door.

I took them for a hay count or something the grandson was doing. I had driven past them hundreds of times and never thought another thought.

Emmitt took me out there on Sunday, after they told us Elwin would live. A stroke on the left side of the brain, the doctors said, speech and the right arm and leg hit hardest.

He might talk again. He might walk with a cane. They said the ambulance had been everything, and the ambulance had been the lane.

Joanne parked by the barn, and I got out into the clean cold sunshine. Two columns of marks ran side by side down the red boards, each a short upright stroke with a date written under it in a hand I knew.

One column in white chalk. One in yellow.

“White’s you,” Emmitt said. “Yellow is Grandpa.”

I put my hand flat on the boards, which were warm in the sun. The first white mark carried the date of the first snow after Lorraine’s funeral. The first yellow carried the same date.