…saw that she was about my age. Not a ghost. Not a story. A woman of forty-six in a wool coat with her ears gone red, standing in twenty below on a section road in Renville County, looking up at a man who’d just climbed down off a grader to block her way.
I said something stupid about the cold. She watched my mouth and then she pointed at her ear and shook her head.
Deaf. Twelve years of lifting my hand off the wheel, twelve years of her not lifting one back, and she had never once heard the machine coming up behind her.
We wrote it out on the back of my blade log with a carpenter’s pencil, standing in the wind, taking turns. Her name is Marta. Her father went off that road on the twelfth of January, 1979, into the ditch below the Halvorson corner, in a whiteout, in a truck that wasn’t found until the fourteenth. She was one year old.
He’s not in the Lutheran cemetery. They took him back to Minnesota, where his people were, which is why I read forty-one stones in August and found nothing.
So there’s nothing out here to visit. That’s the whole thing. There’s no grave, no marker, no house left standing — there is a stretch of gravel between a corner and a cemetery, and it is the last place on this earth her father was alive, and she has been walking it on the twelfth of the month since she was old enough to drive herself.
I asked her, on the paper, if she wanted me to quit stopping.
She wrote back: No. Wave with both hands. I’ll see it.
I plow that stretch first now, every twelfth, whether it’s on the county’s list or not.
