The Lane I Plowed First

Next white. Next yellow. Same storm, same night. Down the whole wall, seven winters, in pairs. Fifty-four white marks and fifty-three yellow, side by side.

Each time I had taken my blade up that lane, he had gone out and taken a shovel to my gate. At the bottom, the last white stroke carried the date of that very week.

Beside it was a clean board where the yellow was supposed to go.

“He keeps them even,” the boy said. “That’s why I do the chalk now. He used to climb on a bucket and do it himself, and then his hip got bad. He says the minute they’re not even, you’re in debt.”

Emmitt kicked at the snow. “He wasn’t counting yours, I don’t think. I think he was counting his. He wanted to be sure he’d matched you.”

I stood there and could not talk. Seven winters. I had thought I was the only one out in the dark, doing something lonely and fine, and all that time he had been out there on the other side of a wire fence with a coffee can of salt, doing the same thing in the opposite direction, waiting for a man to lift his head.

Two proud men at three in the morning, doing for each other and never once saying so. We had been so busy keeping score that we never noticed we were playing on the same side.

Emmitt picked up the stub of yellow chalk from the ledge and held it out. “You could do this one,” he said. “He’d say that’s cheating. But he’s not here.”

So I stood on the bucket where an old man had stood for seven winters and made one yellow stroke beside the white one, for the storm that put him on his floor. My hand shook.

“Now they’re even,” Emmitt said.

“Not by a long way,” I said.

Cedars

It took Elwin eleven days to say his first word to me.

I went to see him on the second day, and the third, and the fifth. I brought a thermos and word of Jimmer, who was sleeping at the foot of our bed, which Marcene pretended not to allow.

The right side of his face had come back some, but not the words. I did not say what I had come to say.

Every time I got to the part where I had to open my mouth, something shut it.

On the eleventh day they moved him to Prairie View. It was a bright Saturday, dry and bitter. Marcene was there in her scrubs, because it was her shift, and she looked at me over the bed and then went and found something to do in the hall.

I sat down in the chair.

“Elwin,” I said.

He turned his head. The eyes were clear and a little amused, if you want the truth, as if he had been waiting for me to get on with it.

“I have something to say, and I’ve been ten years getting to it, and I’d like you to let me get through it without helping.”

“The fence is yours,” I said.

“The fence is yours. Eleven feet at the road, nine at the back. Dad set it wrong in sixty-eight off a bad corner stone, and I knew it when that surveyor opened his plat sheet at my door. I couldn’t stand for it to be Dad’s mistake.