The Lane I Plowed First

“You asked me for one sentence, and I told you to take me to court, and I let you carry that ten years.

“I let Lorraine die with her best friend’s husband sitting in a truck in the church lot. And I took a plow to your lane every winter so you’d feel it. That wasn’t kindness. I want you to know I know that. It was a way to hold it over you.”

“I’m sorry, Elwin. For the fence, and for Lorraine. And I’m sorry I never knew about the gate.”

Then his left hand came up off the blanket. Not high. Maybe four inches. The fingers opened and closed, one, two, three, four, and lay flat.

It was a wave. Four fingers lifted, the way a man lifts his hand off a steering wheel. He did it lying on his back in a bed with a rail on it, and it took everything he had.

His mouth worked, and out of that wreck of a face, slowly, one word at a time, with spaces between them as long as winter, he said, “Took. You. Long.”

I put my forehead down on the edge of his mattress, and Elwin Tollefson put his good hand on the back of my neck and held it there.

I do not know how long. Long enough that when Marcene came back to the door with the coffee cart, she stopped and set it down and just stood.

Moving the wire

We moved the fence in May.

Elwin was home by then, in the downstairs bedroom, with an aide in the mornings and Joanne on weekends and Emmitt every day after practice.

He had a walker and a cane and about forty words, and he spent them like a man spending cash. He had decided to be at the fence when it came down, and nobody argued.

Lyle, the shop foreman, drove out on his day off with a post driver, and Marcene brought a pan of bars.

I pulled the old wire myself with Emmitt on the other end. Almost sixty years in the ground, and it let go of those posts like it had been waiting.

The new line went in eleven feet toward my side at the road, nine at the back, straight as a chalk line.

That left all thirty-one cedars, my father’s windbreak, on the Tollefson side of the new wire. I had told myself I could bear it.

I walked down the row touching the bark, and I had to stop at the fourth tree because my throat went tight.

“Burd,” Elwin said.

He sat in one of Joanne’s folding chairs at the end of the row, in a Carhartt coat with a blanket over his knees.

He pointed his cane down the line of trees. It took him a while.

“Stay,” he said.

“They’re on your side now.”

He shook his head slowly. “Yours. Look at. Sten. Planted.” He worked at the next part, and I let him. “I don’t. Want. Trees. I want. Them. There.”

He wanted them there. That was all he had ever wanted. Not the land or the cedars or the satisfaction. He wanted the wire set right and the trees left standing, and his neighbor to look out his window every morning and see them.