The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

But we sold the snowmobile two winters ago to help pay the deductible, and anyway I knew how it would go. Orvin would plant his feet.

He’d say I was hysterical. And while we stood there arguing about diesel, the clock would keep running on my son’s blood.

There is no arguing with a man about diesel while that clock runs. So I didn’t.

I want to say one more thing about Orvin, before anybody decides what he is. He is seventy-four. He was raised on that same place by a father who lost two fingers to a corn picker and went back out to finish the field the same afternoon.

In the big blizzard of ’66 he was fourteen, and he and his dad walked a rope to the barn for four days and milked by lantern, and nobody in that house ever said the word tired.

Orvin believes weather is weather, and a boy doesn’t get babied, and the sickness that doesn’t show on the outside isn’t much of a sickness. When Cody first got sick, Orvin told me at the table that we were making him soft.

He truly did not believe that one day mattered. I knew that. It didn’t make it hurt less.

I looked out the window past the barn. Across the section, a little under a mile as the crow flies, I could see the dark line of Della Rustad’s shelterbelt and the red roof of her horse barn, the snow already blowing off it in long white ribbons.

Della keeps Belgians. Her husband, Arne, raised them for forty years and drove them in every parade in the county, and when he died three springs ago, people figured she’d sell the last pair.

She didn’t. She kept the team and she kept the old bobsled too, the one Arne used to haul hay out to the cattle in the winters when the tractor wouldn’t start.

I grew up on my grandpa’s place near Hatton. He farmed with a tractor like everybody, but he kept a team until I was twelve, for feeding in deep snow and because he loved them.

I used to stand between his knees on the hayrack and hold the lines with him. I hadn’t touched a set of lines in thirty-two years.

“Cody,” I said. “Get dressed. Long johns, two pair of socks, the snow pants. Put your stocking cap by the door and don’t go anywhere.”

He looked at me. “Where are we going?”

“The highway,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

I put on my red knit hat and pulled my tan canvas chore coat over two sweatshirts. I put on Nils’s insulated bibs because mine are too short, and the good mittens, and I went out the back door and across the yard to the section line.

The storm had packed the snow into hard waves, like the ocean stopped all at once. Some of it held my weight and some of it didn’t, and the parts that didn’t took me in past my knees.

The cold was the clean, dry, after-blizzard kind that freezes the hairs in your nose on the first breath. The sky was such a hard blue it almost rang.