Freeze-Up
The creek froze solid the third week of October. We winterized the plant and drained the pumps and parked the loader and Clay’s excavator side by side in the shop, and I put the green ball cap on the nail by the door where Clay always hung it.
Eli wore the nugget on a leather cord around his neck all winter.
He had taken it down to the jeweler in Dawson and had a small loop soldered on, and he paid for it himself out of his wages, and would not let me help.
Some nights, at the kitchen table doing his schoolwork, I would see him reach up without thinking and touch it through his shirt. I never said anything about it. Some things you leave be.
Rand spent the winter working at the fuel depot in town. He came to Christmas dinner.
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He was quiet, and he brought a pie from the bakery, and when we said grace he bowed his head lower than anybody at the table.
He paid back every dollar of the sixty by the end of January.
Hap came to Christmas dinner too, and so did Duncan and Lorna, which had never happened before.
Duncan and Hap argued for an hour about where the old pay streak on Bonanza crossed the creek, and I sat and listened and thought how much Clay would have liked to be in that argument.
May
Eli finished school in the spring and did not apply anywhere. I asked him once if he was sure.
He said he had never been surer of anything, and I believed him, because he said it the way his father used to say things.
Hap said he would keep running Clay’s excavator for us one more summer, until Eli was ready for it.
He said Eli had good hands on the loader, better than Clay’s at that age, and then he said he would deny it if anybody told Clay, and then he remembered, and we were all quiet for a second, and then we laughed.
We started the season on the fourteenth of May. There was still snow in the shade on the north side of the hills, but the creek was open and the willows were coming out, that pale green they only have for about a week.
I stood at the wash plant with my hand on the switch, the way I had for nineteen springs, and I watched my son climb up into the loader and close the door, with Hap already swinging the excavator on the gravel above him.
He sat there a minute with his hands on the controls. Then he reached up and touched the nugget on its cord, just once, and started the engine.
And Eli ran the loader that morning on the cut his father opened.