The Sledding Hill the Town Built

“Lowell says you want me to ice a hill,” he said. “If it’s all right.”

“It’s all right if it stays under twenty degrees. I won’t put water on snow if it’s thawing. It runs, and you’ve got a mess of slush.” There was a pause on the line. “Forecast says fourteen Saturday.”

“Fourteen’s good?”

“Fourteen’s real good,” Craig said. “If you get the snow piled and packed by two, I’ll have the tanker there at two-thirty. Ought to freeze hard in an hour. By dark you’ll have a sheet like a skating rink.”

“Craig, I can’t thank you.”

“Thank me when I see your dads,” he said. “I have never once seen thirty men agree on a thing.”

That night I put one line on the town Facebook page. I wrote it four times and deleted it three. In the end it was plain.

“Saturday, 9 a.m., park by the ball diamonds. Bring loaders, snowblowers and shovels. Kids on sleds by dark.”

I did not mention Merle. I did not mention the wire. I did not say please. I figured anyone who needed convincing would not have read that far.

Saturday morning I walked out to the park at 8:20.

It was fourteen degrees under a sky so blue it looked painted. The sun was up and the snow had that squeaking, dry crunch that tells you it is going to hold. My breath hung in front of me.

There was one pickup in the lot. My dad’s.

He was sitting in the cab with the engine running and the window rolled down an inch. He had his flat tweed cap on and his hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to do with them. I knocked on the glass.

“I got here at seven,” he said. “Dad, it’s eight-twenty.”

“I was early.”

“You were more than early.”

“I wanted to see if anyone came.” He looked straight ahead through the windshield, at the empty lot and the long white field behind it. “Somebody ought to be here first.”

“Dad.”

“I didn’t cut the wire,” he said. “You asked me not to.”

“I know. Thank you.”

“I want you to know it was hard.”

“I know it was.” He nodded once. Then he turned the key off, and we sat there together in the quiet, and neither of us said anything.

That was when I heard the diesel.

It came from the road behind the village shop, a low grumble that I felt in my chest before I heard it. A skid steer came around the corner of the building with its bucket held low, and the man in the cab lifted two fingers off the lever at me.

It was Brad Vogel, who coaches the junior high wrestling team.

Behind him came a second skid steer, and then a green John Deere loader with a blade, and then a big orange front-end loader that I knew from the co-op yard.

Gus was driving it. He had a thermos in the cupholder and a look on his face I had last seen the day Landon was born.

I got out of the truck.