The Sledding Hill the Town Built

“There’s room.”

They sat down on the plastic sled, one behind the other, Tanner’s long legs wrapped around Landon’s. Landon pushed off with both hands.

And then they were going, down the face of the iced hill, the light sparkling on the glaze, the sled picking up speed and one boy shouting and the other shouting back, and the whole town let out one breath at the same moment.

They went the length of the park. They went past the swing set and nearly to the road before the sled finally slowed and tipped them into the snow, laughing, flat on their backs with their arms spread, staring up at the blue.

And then the line surged, and the hill was open, and the sound that rose over the park was something I had not heard in a week and had not realized I was missing. It was children, screaming with joy.

I stood at the bottom with my father. He was still holding the red wooden sled in front of him. He had not let go. He was looking past the crowd, across the park, to the road.

“Shelby,” he said. “What?”

“Look.”

I turned. At the far edge of the park, at the corner by the grocery, a pickup had pulled onto the shoulder. It was a faded green Ford with a sheet-metal toolbox in the bed and a seed-cap silhouette behind the wheel.

It sat there, idling, with the engine running and the exhaust hanging in the cold.

It had been there a while. I could tell by the frost on the hood.

Merle had come to see the hill.

He did not get out. He did not honk. He sat behind the glass with both hands on the wheel, and across two hundred yards and a hundred shouting children I could not see his face.

But I could see his head turn, very slowly, from the top of the hill to the bottom, and then to the red wooden sled in my father’s hands.

The truck sat there for a long time. And then, slowly, it pulled away from the curb and drove off down Main Street, and I thought that was the end of it.

It was not.

By dark there were more than two hundred kids on that hill, and the last of them did not leave until Craig’s volunteers ran out of patience and flipped on the truck’s floodlights. I counted it up later with Lowell.

Two hundred and eleven children, thirty-four men, seven loaders and about forty truckloads of snow. The co-op’s diesel bill came to a little under four hundred dollars, and Orville Dvorak never sent it.

My father went home with the red sled. He hadn’t ridden it. He said it wasn’t his turn, and I saw him put it back on the hook in the garage, carefully, with the rope looped over the runner.

The week after was a quiet one.

Merle did not come to the co-op for coffee. Orville told Gus the table was strange without him, and also that nobody had said a word about moving over to make room. Tanner’s mother, Kari, wouldn’t take my calls, and I didn’t blame her.