The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

Orvin answered on the second ring, the way he always did, like the phone had been sitting in his hand. “Kristin,” he said, before I’d even said hello. “It’s still blowing.”

“It quit an hour ago,” I said. I was standing at the kitchen window with the cord stretched as far as it would go, looking at the yard.

“Cody’s chair time is twelve-thirty. I need the lane, Orvin. I need you to blow it out.”

There was a long pause on the line, the kind he used when he wanted you to hear how foolish you sounded.

I could hear his radio going in the background, the farm market report, a man reading cash prices for soybeans in a voice like a church usher.

“That’s four miles of drifts,” he said. “Some of them six foot through the low spot by the slough. Twenty gallons of diesel, easy. That’s seventy-five dollars to blow it once, and the wind picks up this afternoon and fills it right back in. No sense doing it twice.”

“He can’t miss, Orvin.”

“He can miss a day.” He said it plain, the way he’d tell you a heifer was due or the elevator was closed.

“I missed a whole week of school in ’66, the big one, and nobody died. The boy can go Monday. You’re babying him.”

Then the line went dead. He didn’t slam it. He just set it down, the way you’d set down a tool you were done with.

I stood there holding the phone until it started that loud off-the-hook tone, and then I hung it up and looked at my son.

Cody was sitting at the kitchen table in his sweatpants with his left arm laid out flat in front of him, the way he always carried it now, careful.

That arm has his fistula in it, the place where the surgeon tied an artery to a vein so the needles would have something strong to go into.

If you put your fingers on it you can feel it hum, like a cat purring under the skin. He calls it his motor.

He was fifteen that January. His kidneys quit when he was thirteen, after a strep infection that went where it shouldn’t have and a fever that nobody, including me, took seriously enough in time.

I have spent two years trying not to think about that.

Since then he has gone to dialysis three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, four hours a chair.

A machine pulls his blood out through one needle, cleans it, takes off the water his body can’t get rid of, and puts it back through the other.

When he skips nothing, he is a fifteen-year-old boy who plays trumpet in the pep band and argues with me about haircuts. When things back up, he is something else.

Things were backing up. He had gone Wednesday, and then the storm came in Thursday noon and blew for twenty-two hours straight, the kind of North Dakota blizzard where you string a rope from the house to the barn and you don’t let go of it.

Friday morning the sun came out on a world that had been erased.

That morning his ankles were puffy when he came down the stairs. Not much, but I knew how to look by then.