The Sledding Hill the Town Built

They kept coming. Insulated bibs, orange stocking caps, feed-store jackets, a few old Carhartts in that faded brown that has no name. Dads, mostly, though some were granddads. A few were teenagers, big farm boys in wrestling sweatshirts, who had heard about it from Landon and come on their own.

I saw the high school principal. I saw the Lutheran pastor in a pair of waders, of all things, because he hadn’t owned insulated pants and a man at church had loaned him the only thing that fit.

Brad Vogel found me at the edge of the lot and asked if I wanted to say a few words. I told him he should.

So Brad turned around and cupped his hands and shouted across the whole lot, over the diesels, “Let’s build a hill!” and the men cheered like they were at a football game.

The work went faster than I would have believed.

First came the trucks, all three of them backing up one after another to the pile behind the shop, where the village plow had been dumping since the January storm. Loaders scooped, trucks hauled, trucks dumped on the swell of ground by the cottonwoods.

Then the loaders pushed and stacked, scoop by scoop, higher and wider, turning a flat snowy corner of the park into a mountain.

Gus ran the big loader. He had a feel for it like a man who plays a piano. He’d drop a load at the top, back down, scoop and climb again, and every time he reached the summit I could see him look out over the park for a second, the way a farmer looks over a field in June.

At two o’clock the pile was twenty feet high and as wide at the base as a basketball court.

Craig Eberhart’s tanker rolled in at two-thirty, right on time.

It is a red truck, older than my son, with a faded number on the door. Craig climbed down with a lined jacket on, a yellow helmet under his arm, and a look on his face like he’d made up his mind to enjoy himself. Two other volunteers dragged out the hose.

“All right,” Craig said. “I’m going to start at the top and work down, light coats. You don’t want to hit it all at once. Let it freeze between passes. That’s how you get a good hard sheet.”

“Is fourteen still good?”

“Fourteen’s perfect.” He tilted his helmet toward the sky. “Wind’s down. We might even get a gift.”

By four o’clock, they were saying a hundred kids.

I counted to see if it was true. There were more than a hundred. Kids on foot, kids in wagons, kids carried in snowsuits like stuffed sausages. Kids from our church and kids from the Catholic church and kids who don’t go anywhere.

And at the front of the line, with his mittens clutched in front of his chest, stood the Fenner twin who had looked at me on Wednesday.

He looked up at the hill and then at me. This time he was smiling so hard his nose scrunched up.

Right then, just before the line surged, my dad touched my elbow. “Shelby, I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“The garage.”

“Dad, you can’t miss it.”

“I won’t. I’ll be ten minutes.” He was already walking toward the pickup, his hip hitching. “I forgot something.”