The Sledding Hill the Town Built

The wire stayed up across the empty pasture, and the hill behind it sat white and silent all week, and the Fenner twins rode the new one every afternoon.

That was the consequence, and he had earned all of it. A man who shuts a hill on a hundred children does not get to walk back into the café as though nothing happened.

The next Saturday, at nine in the morning, I heard a tractor.

I was in the park with Landon, packing steps.

A thaw had softened the top of the new hill overnight, and Brad Vogel had asked us to come patch it. I looked up, and a faded red Farmall with a front blade was coming down Main Street at about six miles an hour, with a long gray man in a seed cap sitting very straight on the seat.

Behind the tractor, on a flatbed hitched to the drawbar, lay four coils of barbed wire.

He had cut every strand himself. I saw the staple marks in the bed, and the clean snipped ends, and the leather gloves he’d worn to do it.

Merle parked at the foot of the hill and shut the engine off. The park went quiet. Fifty kids stopped in the middle of whatever they were doing and stared.

He climbed down slowly. He walked to my father, who had come out to help with the shovel and stood leaning on it near the cottonwoods.

I could not hear what they said. I saw my father’s face. I saw him take off his glove.

They shook hands. It lasted a long time. Then Merle turned to Landon, who had stopped dead with a packed-snow shovel in his hands, and said in his flat gravel voice, “You wrestled a good match.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Better than my boy.” He cleared his throat. “Grandson. My grandson. I was wrong to walk out. Both of you boys did right.”

Merle looked past him at Tanner, who stood by the swing set in his own coat, because Kari had brought him and stayed in the car. Then my uncle took hold of the blade lever, climbed back onto the seat, and said, loud enough for the whole park to hear, “Where do you want it graded, Brad?”

He spent the whole morning on that tractor. He scraped the thaw off the face of the hill and pushed the loose snow into the ramp, and at noon Orville Dvorak walked across the lot with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and held it up to him without a word.

That afternoon, when the line was long again, I saw him walk over to my father’s pickup and take the red wooden sled out of the bed, where Dad had left it.

He turned it over once in his big hands and looked at the underside, where a thirteen-year-old had let his brother paint the last coat.

Then he carried it to the top of the hill himself, and he sat Tanner down on it, and he gave him one push.

I have never heard that boy laugh so loud.

The gate on the Hartman pasture has stood open since, and the hill behind it is full again, with sleds on both. But the kids still love the park the most, and I have never minded. It is where the town got to say yes.