four o’clock Mom and Grandma heard the bells on the harnesses of Nels’s team. Nels, rosy-cheeked and frosted with snow, appeared in the kitchen door. “Elizabeth,” he told my grandma, “I’d ask for a cup of coffee, but we better get going.” Grandma, two steps ahead of him, handed him the Thermos.
Nels had piled a row of bales around the sleigh and scattered loose hay in between. Over that he piled blankets, with a buffalo robe on top to keep out the snow and weight down the coverlets. He and Grandma got Mom into the sleigh. They could hear Grandpa’s tractor out on the road, working away at the drifts, and grandma got down with Mom under Nels’s cold pile of blankets. As Nels called out to the horses and the runners crunched down into the hard snow, Mom remembers the smell of alfalfa hay in the close air around her and a weight of blankets pulled up to her chin. Between gusts of snow, she saw stars, one glittering with particular brightness. She nearly lost consciousness during each contraction, but in between she was sharp and lucid. They say the body retains everything, a catalog of every breath, every meal, every fright the organism you inhabit has ever experienced. The library of that cellular memory is one roomy place. But for the average person, we have the call numbers to only a fraction of the holdings. Not so for Mom and that night: everything so clear she can picture, hear, and smell it to this day. She kept praying. It was all she could do: pray the baby would come safe. Seeing that bright star in the clear sky, she felt in her heart that her prayers would be answered.
It was good that Grandpa called Nels because the last three-quarters-mile of road, where it rose to meet the highway, Grandpa parked the tractor and walked ahead of the team holding the bridles to urge on the big black animals. By then Josh was on his way. The harness bells sang as Nels’s horses broke through each new drift. “We’re almost there, Elizabeth, almost there,” Nels told Grandma. He saw the red and yellow flashing of the ambulance and road maintainer on their way up the hill. Nels’s sleigh reached the intersection. Grandma told Mom to hold on, but Mom’s time had come. Josh was born on the worn wooden bed of that bobsleigh with only my grandmother to help him into the world, born in the rough hay in the blowing snow as Nels Myhre’s team stood steaming from the effort of pulling the birthing suite uphill. The eerie thing was, Josh didn’t cry. When the sleigh broke through that last drift into the space the maintainer had just cleared, Dr. Razavi and one of the ambulance men climbed into the bobsleigh to help Grandma take care of Josh and hold up a light. Razavi was the one to tell Mom she wasn’t done yet, that there was another baby. And that’s when I was born. For all the extremity of his birth, Josh, wrapped in one of Nels’s blankets, was just fine.
Mom would look at me (one half of her December blizzard surprise, the one assisted into the world by the trained hands of a doctor of medicine under a battery-powered spotlight) when she got to this part of telling her story, and grab my arm. She said Nels Myhre and Grandpa were minding the team, the horses so agitated it took the two men to keep them from jerking the sled one way and another, its runners groaning against the snow, bells ringing. When he heard the news of my arrival, Nels said that the birth of two healthy boys in the teeth of that winter blizzard was a miracle, a sign.
“They’re meant to do something special in the world, Maria,” he said when he came round to the back.
Dr. Razavi looked Mom in the face and said he thought Nels was right. He took a gold ring off the little finger of his right hand and pressed it into her palm. “Take this, Maria. It will be a reminder to you of what Mr. Myhre says.”
Mom now, in the parking lot, over thirty years later, twisted the re-sized ring on the index finger of her left hand as she looked at Mikesh. I know she was thinking Nels Myhre, dead a decade back, was right. Josh had accomplished his special calling.
“The weather claimed Joshua at last.” She released the ring and took both of Mikesh’s hands. “Thank you for helping my son.”
“He told me to comfort you if I could. Is there anything else I can do?”
Mom held onto Mikesh’s hands, tears watering her eyes, until she found her voice. “Talk to the people who loved him; tell them how he died.” And then, checking herself as she turned away, she shook her head as if freeing cobwebs. “Figure out what he was doing out there! It’d be a comfort for me to know.”
Simon took my mother’s elbow as they walked to the car, but I continued with Mikesh to his pickup.
“I’m sure you would like to just put this behind you, Arnie, but it might be that talking to all the people closest to Josh could be the quickest way to put the questions to rest.” I put out my hand again. “Can I get your promise?”
Mikesh wasn’t eager to commit. But he remembered Josh and my mother’s request, and gave me his telephone number.
chapter 4
Mikesh was happy to put the airless rooms of the Winneshiek County Law Enforcement Center and us, the relations of Josh King behind him. On the drive home he avoided the route that brought him to the accident less than twelve hours earlier. The fog had almost burned off and the day was turning out sunny, the sort of afternoon people hunger for at the late-March end of a winter in which the first snow came before Halloween.
Mikesh, a convert to land owning, came to farming with more deliberation and zeal than his neighbors. He was progressive: selecting an Australian breed of cattle that did well from calf through finish on grass, and were preferred for flavor by customers who would pay extra for quality. He used a system of intensive paddock grazing developed in France to keep his cows on fresh grass through the warm months. In other ways, he was conservative. He raised animals instead of renting out his land to be cropped by a neighbor. He avoided chemicals basic to crops on every farm but his on Scenic Road. He nursed along his aging truck, and allowed, indulgently, that to manage his stock moving in and out of paddocks and fenced away from most of the creek, he needed the bay horse he kept. His best friend Dale Murphy said that Mikesh played at farming.
It had been a month since he was in the saddle. Once he got home he caught Zisca. The horse’s winter coat was rough and dirty. Mikesh curried him down, talking to him, an act that soothed the horse. Mikesh thought it only reasonable that he get familiar and friendly with the animal before seating himself on his back and ordering him around with the pressure of a metal bit against his soft gums. Once Zisca was saddled, they rode out along the road. Mikesh lived in gently rolling country of wide, fenced fields, broken by small woodlands in the few places where the land steepened as it approached a stream or flooded too often to risk plowing. The sun on the remaining snow was blinding, but felt good. Zisca seemed as interested in the ride as Mikesh. The gelding wanted to break from his walk into a trot down the shoulder as they headed away from the farm. On the wrists exposed between his jacket and his deerskin gloves as he held the reins Mikesh could feel the warmth rising off the horse’s neck, could see the alert tension in Zisca’s ears, and feel the happy release of energy in the quick spring of his gait.
The higher temperature was melting the snow, and water was running off the fields and pastures. The creek, normally a quiet trickle, that ran through his place and past the cemetery on its way to the river, could today be heard from the road. Its water was foaming. The spillway in the middle of Waucoma roared, the riverish smell of water hanging in the air. Cakes of ice bobbed in the channel of the Little Turkey below the falls. Two boys in loose stocking caps were on the park side of the dam, throwing ice chunks from a snow pile into the water. The din drowned out their splash, but the boys shouted as they added rings of spray to the mayhem. Spring yesterday became official, and down along the river bottom, it felt, smelled, and sounded like the season had really arrived.
Once back at the farm, Mikesh rode Zisca to check the fences along the whole perimeter of his domain. In the course of the last four months, the cattle had only gone into the pasture as far as the hay feeders, wearing the ground raw around them, leaving the snow along the
