The Sledding Hill the Town Built

The wire was already up when I got there, four strands of it, pulled so tight across the top of the hill that it hummed in the wind.

I had driven out on my lunch hour, still wearing the gray cardigan I keep on the back of my chair at the school office. My boots were in the truck. I stood in the road in my work flats and looked at it.

Uncle Merle was standing beside his pickup with a wire stretcher in his hand. He didn’t wave. He’s sixty-eight and built like a fence post himself, long and gray and hard, with a seed cap he has worn since I was in diapers.

“Nobody sleds here anymore,” he said. “Merle, half this town learned to be brave on that slope.”

“It’s my ground, Shelby.” He said it flat, the way you say the price of corn. Then he bent down and tightened the bottom strand another quarter turn, and the wire sang.

I want to tell you that I said something sharp and wonderful. I didn’t. I said, “Okay,” and I got back in my truck, because I was thirty-seven years old and the school bell was going to ring in twenty minutes, and because he was right.

That was the whole problem. He was right.

The hill sits at the north end of the Hartman pasture, a mile and a half outside Brockton, Nebraska, and the town has been sledding on it for sixty years. It is not a big hill. Maybe thirty feet of rise, a long smooth shoulder of prairie grass that fills with snow every January.

Nothing about it is special except that every family in Brockton has a picture of a kid at the bottom of it with red cheeks and a grin.

My grandfather Otto owned that pasture. In the winter of 1966 he stood at the top of it with a half dozen farm kids and a few of their dads, shook hands all around, and told the whole town it was theirs for sledding as long as they shut the gate and kept the dogs off the cattle.

There was no paper. Nobody in those days would have thought to ask for one.

When Grandpa Otto died, the pasture went to my uncle Merle, who was the oldest. The farm ground went to my dad, Gerald, in a split that took a lot of afternoons at the kitchen table to settle.

The handshake went to nobody. It just stayed in the air over the hill, and for twenty years it held.

Now it was a Monday in January, eleven degrees at noon, and the air was empty.

I should tell you why I could not just fix it. People ask me that, and it is a fair question. I could have called the county sheriff, but there was nothing to call him about. A man can fence his own pasture.

I could have gone to my dad, but my dad and Merle hadn’t said a word to each other in eleven years, since the machine shed sale, and putting the two of them in a room would have been like lighting a match in a grain bin.

And I could not simply talk to Merle. I tried to picture it, and every version ended with him telling me what he’d told me already.