The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

I told her what Lorna said and where we’d come out on the highway, at the approach where our lane meets 200, and that I thought we’d be there a little after eleven.

“How are you getting him out?” she asked.

“By team,” I said. “Della Rustad’s Belgians.”

There was a pause on the line. Then she said, “We’ll be there at eleven, hon. We’ll wait as long as it takes. You keep him warm.”

I locked the house. I don’t know why. Nobody was coming down that lane. I stepped up onto the front of the sled and took up the lines again, and I looked back once at my son, a pile of his grandmother’s quilts with a face on top, and I said, “Ready?”

“Ready,” Cody said.

“Merle, Patsy,” I said. “Walk up.”

Our lane runs south from the yard, straight as a ruler for the first two miles, through our ground and then onto Orvin’s, past his yard and his shop and on down to the slough and the highway.

Nils’s great-grandfather laid it out with a team not much different from the one I was driving. There’s a fence on the west side of it the whole way, and that morning the fence posts were the only thing in the whole white world that told me where the lane was.

Some of the posts stuck up three feet out of the snow. Some of them showed only their tops, like a row of brown buttons.

I steered by them. Post to post, the way you’d cross a creek on rocks.

The sky stayed that hard bright blue, and the sun on the snow was so strong I had to squint through my lashes. The wind had dropped to almost nothing, but every little gust lifted the tops of the drifts and sent snow streaming off them like smoke off a grass fire.

Behind us, every time I looked back, our farmhouse was a little smaller.

Cody counted fence posts. He started it on his own after the first half mile, out loud, in a voice he pitched just loud enough to carry over the runners.

“Forty-one. Forty-two.” I knew why. He was letting me know he still had the breath to do it, so I wouldn’t have to keep turning around.

“Forty-three,” he said. “Mom. What are their names again?”

“Merle and Patsy.”

“Like the singers?”

“Della’s husband named them. He used to sing to them every morning. She says he had a terrible voice.”

Cody was quiet for a few posts. Then, very softly, he started to hum. It was one of those old Patsy Cline songs his grandma used to play on the record player in the front room when he was little and she’d babysit him, the one she’d hum while she ironed.

I didn’t know he remembered it. I don’t think he knew he remembered it until right then.

Patsy’s ears went back toward him and stayed there. She walked on with her ears turned back to that boy humming in a pile of quilts, the whole rest of the way to Orvin’s.

I had to look straight ahead for a while after that.

At the two-mile mark the lane comes up out of a little dip and runs right along the edge of Orvin’s yard, close enough that you could throw a rock and hit his porch.

His shop sits on the near side, and his tractor was parked in front of it with the snow blower already mounted on the three-point, the way he keeps it from November to April.