The Team That Pulled My Boy Through

They unwound the quilts off Cody one by one, and folded them, and handed them up to me, and then they lifted him off the sled between them and carried him to the ambulance like he weighed nothing at all.

The woman put her hand on my arm. “We’ve got him, Kristin. Come on. You’re riding with us.”

I handed the lines to Della’s grandson. My hands wouldn’t open all the way. He had to take them out of my fingers.

Della rolled down her window. “Go,” she said. “I’ve got my horses. Go.”

I climbed up into the back of the ambulance. The last thing I saw out the back windows before they shut the doors was Merle and Patsy standing at the end of our lane in the bright sun, steaming like two locomotives, and Della’s grandson rubbing Patsy’s face, and Della in the pickup with her hand up against the glass, the same way Orvin had his.

Lorna met us at the door of the unit herself. She’d already drawn his labs by the time I got my coat off, and when the potassium came back it was 6.4.

She showed me the number and didn’t say anything about it, which told me more than talking would have. He was hooked up by twelve-twenty, ten minutes early, and she stayed with him until six that night, two hours past her shift.

Cody slept through most of it. I sat beside the chair and watched the blood run through the lines, out and back, out and back, and I didn’t cry until I went to the bathroom, and then I did, with the water running so nobody would hear.

Nils got home Saturday afternoon, when they opened the roads, and walked the last four miles in from the highway on foot because the lane was still shut.

He came in the door and held onto me for a long time without saying a word, and then he went upstairs and sat on the end of Cody’s bed until the boy woke up.

That same afternoon I took seventy-five dollars out of the coffee can in the pantry and put it in an envelope.

On the outside I wrote, in my best church-bulletin handwriting: For the diesel. Monday’s chair time is twelve-thirty. I’ll be leaving the yard at ten.

I walked it the two miles down the lane on the crust that afternoon, in bright sun, and put it inside his porch door where he’d find it. I didn’t knock. I didn’t need to.

By Sunday morning the whole county knew. Della told her sister on the phone, and her sister told the café, and the volunteer crew told everybody else.

Nils and I walked out to the highway for church and Della picked us up, and Orvin came in his own way, by the short approach from his yard to the township road.

I had typed the prayer list into the bulletin Thursday, the way I do every week, and there was Cody’s name where it always is.

But when the pastor read it out, he added one line I hadn’t written: “and thanks to God for Della Rustad’s team, and for the mother who drove it.”

Every head in that church turned. Not toward me. Toward the third pew on the left, where Orvin has sat every Sunday of his life.