Christmas with Tucker

by Greg Kincaid

  Intermittently, when the sun poked through, there were strong, defined shadows on a winter white pallet of freshly fallen powder. I suppose it might have been a nice day, if you were a caribou or a polar bear.

  As I walked down to the pond, the daunting task of driving the maintainer weighed heavily on me.

  Chapter 19

  THE DRIFTING snow was up to my hips as I pushed my way to the pond, dragging the shovel and the sledgehammer. As I walked, I followed a path to the water that the cows had already trampled down. Every time I veered off the path, I stumbled into a little ditch or ravine hidden by the sea of snow.

  In the winter months, because they were not foraging for grass, the cattle spent most of their time in the barnyard. We kept water for them in heated stock tanks. But with the electricity out, the tanks would freeze and they would have no other choice but to wander down to the pond for water.

  In the brains department, cattle are way below horses and pigs. If they can’t find a water hole, they’ll wander onto the ice looking for one, and sometimes they’ll break through and make their own opening to drink from—a farmer can only hope it happens near the bank, where it’s shallow. Every few years some poor cow won’t be so lucky. If it’s cold long enough, she might wander out toward the middle of the pond toward deeper water. When the ice breaks, she can’t get out. This is another reason we kept the stock tanks by the barn and why my grandfather wanted me to make sure there was a large, clear opening.

  At the water’s edge, I found a small hole the cattle had been using. I used the shovel first to clear the snow away from a four-foot-by-four-foot opening near shore. The ice was smooth and clear beneath the snow.

  I raised the sledge and brought it down hard on the surface of the ice. The sledge seemed to only glance off the frozen surface, with sparks of ice blasting into my face. I looked down at the half-dollar-size dent and tried again, and still again, with little result to show for my efforts.

  It seemed that the ice was more determined and a lot tougher than I had given it credit for. I tried again, this time closer to the small opening the cows had made on their own, and had some success. I was able to break off a piece the size of two bricks. I pulled the piece of ice out of the water and in the process soaked my gloves.

  From that small beginning, I grew encouraged and chipped away, but still, it was not nearly a large enough opening.

  With visions of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox in my head, I swung down as hard as I could. The sledge glanced off the ice and twisted out of my control. The next solid object it came into contact with was my foot. Even though the ice absorbed much of the force, it still hurt, sending a jolt of pain up my leg and knocking me clean off my feet. After letting out a yelp, I fell, bottom down, into the very hole I had cut into the ice. This was not going well.

  I was hoping that no one could see me in this most ridiculous of positions, seemingly resting my backside in a giant frozen toilet bowl, when I heard the first howls of laughter.

  “Are you okay?” my grandfather asked between spasms. He had been standing there all along watching me, holding a sixteen-pound sledge in his hand.

  “I guess. I sort of hit my foot.”

  “What did you do that for? You were supposed to break the ice and not your foot. And, George, if you needed to use the pot, you should have gone back up to the house.”

  My grandfather let out another laugh from the deepest part of his belly and offered me his hand. I stood up, sore foot and all, looked at my wet backside, and laughed right along with him.

  It was nice to see my grandfather laugh. I hadn’t seen him do that in months. I teased him right back. “Well, what are you standing around for? We’ve both got work to do.”

  I swung the sledge again, this time with force and control, as much as anything to prove that he had not chosen a boy for a man’s job.

  He bellowed, “Good shot! We’ll do this together, like old-time railroad workers.”

  He brought his sledge down hard on the ice. It was as if our pond had become a bass kettledrum, booming in the early-morning hours.

  Soon we found a rhythm and chunks of ice gave way to our assault. My grandfather used the shovel to flick the blocks of ice out onto the pond’s surface. When we had the four-foot area cleared, he knelt down in the snow to catch his breath.

  His voice took a serious tone. “Do you remember when Mr. Riley lost eighteen head, all drowned?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “It’s an important job I’m giving you. Do you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Until we get power, can you keep this hole wide open?”

  I nodded my head up and down. “Yes, I can do it.”

  “Now that we have the hole cut, it’ll be much easier just keeping it clear of ice. Why don’t you go inside and change your clothes. When you’re ready, we’ll start the hand-milking.”

  As I put on dry things, I thought of the maintainer again. I knew more about hand-milking—which wasn’t much—than I did about driving that big machine. But I would let Grandpa teach me in the order he saw fit. I joined him at the barn and we let the cows in, six at a time.

  Once in the barn, each cow buried her wet, steaming snout into the trough filled with the feed that we stored in the grain bin for the winter. While they enjoyed their breakfast, my grandfather and I went to work on the other end, milking the old-fashioned way.

  Bo McCray could milk twice as fast as any man alive and certainly faster than me. By 7:30, we had all of the milk up and into the cooler, where it would stay until we could move it to the end of the driveway. Though the cooler could not refrigerate the milk since we had no power, it was still cold enough to hold it at the right temperature.

  I asked my grandfather, “Why aren’t we putting it out by the road for the dairy truck?”

  “Until you and I get the roads cleared, there won’t be a dairy truck or a school bus or much of anything else getting through. You can go inside and stay warm. I’ll start the maintainer and meet you in the driveway.”

  This was it. He was expecting me to actually drive the maintainer in the snow. Farm boys operate machinery, big machinery, by the time they are thirteen, and I was no exception. I’d learned to drive a tractor as soon as I was tall enough to reach the pedals. But this was more involved. This machine was enormous and even in 1962 probably cost my grandfather as much as a small house. The county paid him by the hour to operate the machine, but he owned it.

  A machine this big surely needed a pilot of similar proportions. Besides, I would be expected to navigate it on roads and not through empty, flat farm fields. It was an entirely different set of operating rules. I did not even have a driver’s license.

  I had ridden with both my father and my grandfather in the cab of the maintainer many times before. On a couple of occasions, during the summer months when they were just grading gravel, they had let me operate the grader on my own, but they were in the cab with me, so there was little risk. It seemed like it was “just for fun.” This was for real.

  I was very confident that I could grade gravel on a warm day, but grading snow, alone, was a different matter. There was something else, too. As I was walking up to the house, Grandma Cora’s words came to me. “It’s not a fair thing to ask him to do.”

  My father had been killed working on a medium-size piece of farm machinery, and now my grandpa was asking me to climb on the maintainer—the biggest, most dangerous, and most difficult machine parked in the implement shed. At first I’d been flattered that Grandpa was trusting me to do this, but now I was downright scared, not sure this was a fair thing to ask of me. Maybe the time would come when I could do this, but now?

  As I changed my clothes, these doubts continued to race through my mind. As cold as it was, a clammy sweat formed on my back. When I got ready to leave, my grandmother handed me a sack with cookies and two thermoses—coffee for my grandfather, hot chocolate for me. She tied a scarf around my neck. It was one that my s
ister had given to my dad last Christmas. She gave me a long hug. “George, please be careful.”

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to help, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do this. Not yet.”

  She grabbed my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes and smiled. “If you don’t want to do it, just don’t do it. He’ll ask someone else. He might not like it, but he’ll understand. There will be more snow to plow in Kansas on another day.”

  I don’t know why, maybe because I trusted her so much, but I wanted to be totally honest with her. My voice had one of those embarrassing cracks as I told her exactly how I felt. “I’m kind of scared.”

  She put her arm around me again and pulled me tight against her. “Of course you are. You should be.”

  “I don’t want to disappoint Grandpa.”

  She looked at me very seriously. “The choices we make when we are young can define us for the rest of our lives. There is nothing wrong with being cautious.”

  I choked out my words. “How do we know?”

  “If your mind can’t tell you, then either trust your gut or follow your heart.”

  I had been struggling trying to figure out a lot of things in the last few weeks. For once, something difficult made sense to me. Instead of trying to figure out where to live my life, I needed to concentrate on how to live it. My grandfather’s request for help was like an ancient horn sounding from a mountaintop—a call to courage. It reverberated not in my ears but in my soul.

  In the future, I would have to answer the call alone. This time, the first time—the most frightening of times—I had my grandfather to stand beside me when I answered the call.

  I kissed my grandmother on the cheek, pulled on my hat and gloves, and smiled the biggest, most confident smile I could muster.

  “I’ve got work to do.” I turned and walked out the door and in some ways never came back.

  That morning in December, I became a maintainer. Lifting the blade, adjusting the angle, correct grading speed were all subjects introduced by Big Bo McCray before we left the driveway. But it would be many years before I realized what was really being taught. My grandfather was giving me a new book of adult rules so I could shred the childish primer that had so let me down that year. I learned to become suspicious of rules rooted in entitlement and my needs, and to instead respect rules mortared by truth and concern for others.

  The memories of the days that followed, of working side by side with my grandfather, would carry me through other times in my life when I needed to heed the call not just to maintain roads but to maintain my life—times when I needed rules that would never let me down.

  Chapter 20

  MY GRANDFATHER took one task at a time and tried to explain as we moved down the road toward town. “The transmission exchanges speed and power. The lower gears give you more power to move heavier loads of snow, but with less speed. You’ll do most of the grading in third gear, unless the snow is deep; then, you should use second.”

  There was a lever on the right of the driver’s seat that adjusted the blade height. “I want you to listen very carefully as I lower the blade just an inch.”

  I felt the maintainer’s engine struggle and our speed reduce slightly. The sound of snow coming off the road was interrupted by occasional pings of gravel bouncing off the blade.

  “Now look behind you at the stream of snow coming off the blade. What else do you see?”

  “Pieces of gravel mixed in with the snow,” I said as I glanced over my shoulder.

  “That’s right. In the summer months, Cherokee County spends a lot of money putting gravel down on these roads. They don’t want the McCrays spending the winter months putting it in the ditch.

  “Now listen again. I’m going to raise the blade a few inches above the perfect height.” The maintainer seemed to surge forward and the engine was less burdened. “Now turn around and look again. What do you see?”

  “The maintainer’s tires are leaving a trail through the snow.”

  “Good boy, George; that’s when you know the blade is too high. You shouldn’t be leaving enough snow for the tires to form big tracks.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “George, there is something else you need to know. This is a big, strong piece of machinery. If you take it where it’s not supposed to go, you will get into trouble.”

  I was painfully aware that he was alluding to my dad, but I asked anyway. “What do you mean, Grandpa?”

  “You’ve got to know exactly where you are on the road at all times. Too far to the right or the left and you can drop a tire into the ditch and get stuck, or worse. If you don’t watch ahead of you, you can hit a car. If you don’t watch behind you, you can’t tell if you’re doing your work right.”

  “How can I watch all four directions at once?”

  “You can do it. It just takes practice. Go slowly at first, until it comes naturally to you.” He slowed down, turned left down a county lane, and brought the maintainer to a stop by the side of the road. He opened the maintainer door, moved off the seat, and stood tall on the running board. “Well, scoot over and give it a try.”

  I stood up from the small space to his left where I had been perched and settled into the driver’s seat. My grandfather nodded at me to proceed, staying on the running board. Stretching my legs out so I could reach the clutch pedal, I placed the transmission in third, opened the throttle, and slowly let out the clutch until it reached the friction point. With the door open, snow and cold air was blowing into the cab, but I ignored it and tried to chart a course down the lane. I looked at the road in the rearview mirror and could see my tracks, so I inched the blade down a little.

  Before I had gone too far, my grandfather gave me some more instructions. “Practice starting and stopping a few more times and try to keep the left edge of the blade in the dead center of the road. That way you’ll clean the entire road when you come back at her from the other direction.”

  When I looked behind me, I could see that I was not staying on a straight course but was meandering on and off the center line. “I’m having a hard time keeping it straight.”

  “You’re doing fine. Just draw an imaginary line on the side of the road and keep your right wheel right on top of it.”

  By midday, after a few dozen instructions and corrections, my grandfather and I had cleared Moonlight Road, Prairie Center Road, and Four Corners Road. We were now ready to head home for lunch.

  That morning it seemed my grandfather spoke more words to me than he had in the months leading up to December, and he seemed very pleased with my grading.

  Over lunch, my grandmother went over the list of emergencies phoned in by locals.

  “The Rathers’ daughter is pregnant and the due date is only a week off. They are worried about getting to the hospital and hope you can keep their road cleared.”

  “Sherry Rather,” my grandfather mused. “That would be off of Waverly Road.

  “Do you know Waverly Road?” he asked me. “It’s south of the highway and north of Lone Elm Road.”

  “Sure, I know that stretch and I know right where the Rathers live.”

  My grandmother picked up the next note. “Mrs. Slater only has two days of insulin left. She lives just off the highway on Crossing Trails Road.”

  “Yeah, I know where that is, too.”

  My grandmother turned to the last scrap of paper. “Old Mrs. Reed called and wants to make sure you don’t forget her.”

  My grandfather rolled his eyes. “I just cleared her driveway two days ago.”

  My grandmother laughed and said, “You know how those old people are, worrying all the time.”

  “Cora, Mrs. Reed is only four years older than me!”

  My grandmother smiled but said nothing. My grandfather took out a piece of paper and drew me a map. “George, take a look at this. Does it make sense?”

  I looked it over and I knew exactly what he had in mind. “Sure, Grandpa. I ge
t it.”

  “Now, take your time and do a good job. I am going to sleep a few hours and when you get back, you rest up and I’ll do another shift. Do you have any questions?”

  “Just one.”

  “Yes?”

  “What if I have a problem? A breakdown?”

  “You’re never going to be more than about eight miles from home, since we’re in charge of an eight-mile radius of roads. So, if need be, you can walk home. There are extra gloves and hats in the cab. Stop at any neighbor’s house, if you need to, and they can try to get you home. I’ve been clearing snow for twenty-five years with that old beast and she hasn’t let me down yet. I wouldn’t worry.”

  He then turned to the sink and filled his tin cup with water and handed it to me. “Drink up.”

  My grandmother gave me a sack of her chocolate chip cookies, refilled my thermos, and sent me out the back door to clear the roads of Cherokee County.

  Forgetting all my fears and feeling as if I’d grown five inches that morning, I pulled open the door to the cab, put the maintainer in gear, eased out the clutch, and started down the driveway on my first solo job. Going a little slower than necessary, I built my confidence one step at a time, heading east.

  As I passed Thorne’s shack, I slowed down to get a better look. His brown truck was there, but Tucker was no place to be seen. Thankfully, Thorne had enough sense to keep Tucker inside in this snow. I wondered if he was ignoring my note or even if he’d been sober long enough to think about it.

  The maintainer thrust the snow away effortlessly. Still, I had a hard time keeping the blade centered in the middle of the road, and more than a few passersby must have wondered if old Bo McCray was losing his touch.