The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

The block heater cord was plugged in. It would have started on the first try.

His house sits back of the shop, a white story-and-a-half his own father built, and the kitchen window looks right out at the lane.

I had stood at that window a hundred times myself, doing his dishes on Sundays after his wife was gone.

I kept my eyes on the horses. I did not want to see him, and I did not want him to see me looking.

Cody didn’t keep his eyes anywhere. He was fifteen.

“Mom,” he said quietly. “Grandpa’s at the window.”

I looked then. I couldn’t help it.

Orvin was standing in his kitchen window in his undershirt and his suspenders, with a coffee cup in his hand, the way I’d seen him stand a thousand mornings, watching the weather.

Only he wasn’t watching the weather. He was watching us. His daughter-in-law standing up at the front of Arne Rustad’s old bobsled with the lines in both hands.

Two chestnut Belgians plowing his lane with the steam pouring off them. And his grandson, sitting in the back, wrapped to the eyes in every quilt his wife ever made.

I saw him see the quilts. I saw the very second it happened. He set the coffee cup down on something I couldn’t see, and he put his hand flat on the glass.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t wave. I didn’t call anything out to him. I just drove on past, post to post, and when I glanced back from the far side of his yard he was still standing there with his hand on the window, and he stayed that way until the shelterbelt took him out of sight.

The low spot by the slough was the worst of it, just like Della said. The drifts there had piled up off the cattails as high as the horses’ backs, and for a while I didn’t think we’d get through.

Merle went in up to his chest and stopped. Patsy stopped beside him. I could see their sides heaving.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy now. You’re all right. Take your time.”

They stood for a minute and blew. Then Merle gathered himself and lunged, and Patsy went with him, and the sled tipped hard up on one runner and came back down, and Cody yelped from inside the quilts, and then we were through and up onto the crust on the far side, sliding.

“Still alive back there?” I called.

“Sixty-eight,” Cody said. “Sixty-nine.”

We came up to the highway approach at nine minutes after eleven. I know because I’d made myself not look at my watch the whole way, and then I looked.

The county blade had been through, and Highway 200 was a black strip between two walls of white, and the ambulance was sitting at the end of our lane with its engine running and the back doors already open.

Della’s pickup was parked behind it. Della was sitting in the passenger seat with her bad leg up on the dash, and her grandson was out of the truck and running toward the horses before I had them stopped.

Two of the volunteer crew came through the snow to the sled. One of them was a woman I sit with at the funeral lunches, and one was a boy who couldn’t have been twenty.