Christmas with Tucker (10 page)

This had to be serious or my grandfather wouldn’t have taken so many words to say it. I had seen sorrow cross his face, but until that morning, I had never seen fear in his eyes or heard worry in his voice. My grandfather was comfortable barking orders, but this was different. Until that morning, I had never heard Big Bo McCray ask any man for help, and certainly not a boy like me.

There was only one answer to the question. “Of course I’ll help. What can I do?”

“If you’ll go down and crack the ice on the pond, I’ll start the milking. Later today, I’ll show you how to drive the maintainer. The only way to get through this is to take turns, working in shifts, night and day, until we dig out of this storm.”

“Drive the maintainer!” I said, nearly falling out of my chair. This was a big step up from milking alone. I felt a mix of fear and excitement.

“He’s only thirteen!” my grandmother warned. “Bo, I told
you earlier, it’s not a fair thing to ask him to do.” Her voice cracked and tears began to fall.

“He’s old enough, Cora, and you know I need his help.”

“Then I’ll take a shift driving, too,” she said, wiping her eyes. Like many farmwives, Grandma could drive a truck on a dirt road and a tractor across a field, but I couldn’t recall her driving the maintainer in a snowstorm.

“Cora, you’re strong, but you can’t handle this. And you need to stay and take the emergency calls and help George with the milking when I’m gone. You’ll have your work cut out for you, too. I’ll take two shifts to his one. That way I can sleep a few hours. Let’s eat now and we can start to work at first light. George, you’ll start by cracking that pond ice.”

Certainly there was better help around somewhere in Cherokee County, but I was available, and Grandpa McCray thought I was the man for the job. Maybe my grandfather was just used to partnering with McCray men and wanted to keep it that way. It felt good to be trusted, though I still could hardly believe he was about to trust me with the job of driving the maintainer.

“Use the twelve-pound sledge and make sure the hole is plenty big. You’d better bring a shovel so you can dig down to the ice.”

These were my grandfather’s last orders as I set out for the pond from the back door of our old Kansas farmhouse. It looked as if the entire sky had lost power, too; only a weak diffused light passed through the blowing snow and steel gray clouds. I wore rubber boots that were a good protector from the snow and the pond water but were poor insulators, and my toes were quickly cold. The weather turned harsh and unforgiving as it swept down from the north. No jacket could keep you warm, and the cold was only tolerable if you kept moving.

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.

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 sister 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.