I know what a sensible person is thinking, because my daughter, Kim, has said it to me at least twice a year. Mom, there’s a north door.
There is. But the north door opens on the shelterbelt and the hay ground, and there is no lane to it and never was. To reach it in a car I would have to go out my own driveway, down the section line, through a wire gate and across a quarter mile of two-track on gumbo. Anybody who has lived around Pierre knows what gumbo is when it’s wet. And that door had not been rolled since the week of the funeral. The bottom track was packed with nine years of dirt and a volunteer elm had come up in front of it as thick as my wrist.
A freed door would not have changed that. The door was an hour’s work. The gumbo was the trouble, and no car I could afford was going to cross a quarter mile of it twice a day from March to November.
The south door was the only one a car could get to, and my brother’s wagon and his boat were parked across it. That is the whole of it.
So my car sat in the yard.
It had not always. Len built a lean-to down the east side of the shed, twenty feet by sixty, open to the morning, and for years that was where our pickup and my car lived. But he roofed it with tin off his dad’s old barn, to save money in a year we did not have any, and by the time he died it was more nail holes than tin. I parked under it anyway until a wind in 2020 took two sheets off. After that I parked by the house.
I paid the taxes on that place every April and every October. I paid the insurance on the shed and what was in it. I paid the light bill from the electric cooperative, which runs about forty dollars a month on the shed meter whether I flip a switch out there or not.
Nine years. Alone. And I never said a word about any of it to Vince, because every time I got the words lined up, I saw him at my table at four in the morning with his coat still on.
You do not hand a man like that a bill. That is what I believed.
On the ninth of July I was shelling peas on the porch when the meadowlarks quit.
The sky over the river bluffs had gone the color of an old bruise, green at the edges. I had the radio on in the kitchen and the man was reading out a warning for Stanley County, golf ball hail, moving east at thirty miles an hour.
East was me.
I stood on the porch and looked at my car, a 2017 Equinox, paid for, the first car I ever bought by myself. Then I looked at the shed.
I could have walked out there. I want to be honest about that, because I do not want anybody thinking I am helpless. Len’s tractor was in there with a drawbar on it, and I have been hooking wagons since I was nine years old. Ten minutes and that hay rack would have been out in the yard and my car would have been on dry concrete.
But I had asked. He had said he would get to it. And if I dragged my brother’s wagon out into a hailstorm and it came through with a split deck, I knew exactly how that story would get told at the coffee table at the gas station in town, and I knew it would be told for twenty years. In my family, moving a man’s things without his say is how people stop speaking.
So I did not touch it. I threw two quilts and the porch rug over the hood and the windshield and I went down the cellar.
It lasted eleven minutes. I timed it by Len’s watch, which I still wind.
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