The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

“How many more?” I asked.

“Well,” she said. “Everybody.”

It turned out that word had gone around the family. Some of it was the old Thanksgiving bet. Some of it was that people wanted to see the lane done right after what had happened two years ago.

Some of it, I think, was just that it is November in western Kansas and there is not much else to do.

I drove out to Hazel’s place by myself on Friday afternoon, in my own car, and I walked that lane from the county road to the chute. Then I walked it back. Then I walked it again.

I counted the ruts. I found where the gravel was soft on the west edge near the cedars, where Curtis’s trailer wheels had torn it up two years ago.

I found the low spot by the stock tank. I paced off the gap between the cedars and the tank. It was not much.

Hazel came down off the porch in her chore coat with two cups of coffee and stood beside me at the bottom of the lane.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Bertram could have sent somebody else.”

“I want to,” I said.

She handed me a cup. Then she looked up the lane at the broken cedar stumps and said, “Curtis was scared of this lane before he ever jackknifed in it. His daddy used to make him back the grain truck down it when he was fourteen. He hit that tank twice.”

I had not known that. I looked at her.

“He’s not a bad man,” Hazel said. “He’s my boy, and he’s not a bad man. But what he said to you at my table was wrong. I should have said so then. I’m saying it now.”

I did not know what to say back, so I just stood there with her and drank the coffee while the sun went down behind the windbreak.

Saturday morning came bright and cold, with one of those wide western Kansas skies that goes on forever and has not one cloud in it.

The thermometer on Bertram’s shop said twenty-six degrees when I picked up the truck at five.

I did my pre-trip in the dark with a flashlight, the way I always do. I checked the air. I checked the lights.

I checked every gate on that pot twice. Then I sat in the cab and said the Lord’s Prayer once, quietly, before I put it in gear.

I got to the county road at Hazel’s lane about eight, just as the sun cleared the windbreak.

I could see the farmhouse at the far end, white against the brown pasture, and the porch was full.

I counted later. There were 22 of them. Hazel and Emmett. Aunt Vida with a pan of cinnamon rolls.

Cousins, nephews, a few of the grandkids. Two of Emmett’s buddies from the elevator who had no business being there except that Emmett had told them.

They stood on the porch and in the yard in their winter coats, holding coffee cups, and they were all looking up the lane at my truck.

Down at the bottom, by the loading chute, Curtis stood alone in his tan Carhartt jacket and ball cap, with his hands in his pockets.