Kristin Haugen sat beside the bed of her mother in the hospice room at Bemidji with the window open to the pine trees, and she told me she had carried one question for forty years and was too tired to carry it any further. Her mother, Marlene, was eighty four and sleeping with her mouth slightly open. Kristin held a small green notebook against her chest. “Annie, my mother believes your father killed my stepfather,” she said. “She has believed it since January 1983. And I think he must have lived with that, too.”
I had known for months that the night in question was a heavy one. My father, Arnie Lundquist, had plowed Spruce Lane first every winter for thirty one years, because the people at the end of it, two houses and a widow, had no other way out. That January he had taken a shotgun out of the hands of a drunk man named Gene Pfeiffer, the stepfather of Kristin, on the porch of her mother. Three days later Gene was found dead in the ditch by the county road. And my mother, in her own last year, had told me the plow blade came home bent and my father came home bleeding.
I told Kristin that I did not know what happened. Then I did the only thing I could think of. I drove home and climbed the ladder into the attic of the garage, where my father kept everything he had ever written down. He was a man who wrote down the weather, the gas, the miles, the names of the people he helped. Behind a box of Christmas lights I found twenty six identical black notebooks. The one for 1983 had a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover. My hands were trembling as I opened it.
A man who does a kind thing and stays silent has not hidden the truth. He has only left it in a notebook for someone to find.
The entry for January 14 was written in the square pencil capitals of my father. “1:40 AM. Spruce Lane. Went back to check on the Haugen place after the trouble. the truck of Gene in the ditch at the bend. Gene on the ground in the snow, thirty feet out, not moving. Put chain on him and tried to drag him to the plow. Blade caught the guardrail, bent. Cut my hand on the chain. Got him in the cab. Drove to Bemidji hospital. He was gone before the doors. Doctor said the cold took him. I did not hurt him. God knows.”
There was one more line at the bottom, underlined twice. “If I tell it, they will say I finished what I started on that porch. Marlene already thinks so. Better she hates me than her girls have a story about it.” I sat on the garage floor with that notebook in my lap and cried for the man who had taken the blame for something he did not do, only because he thought it would spare two little girls a worse story. My father never said a word to me about it. Not once. He just kept plowing.
The next morning I brought the notebook to the hospice. Kristin read the page twice and then put her hand over her face. Marlene woke up while she was reading, and she turned her head on the pillow and watched us with the clear, quiet eyes people sometimes get near the end. Kristin knelt by the bed and read the entry aloud, slowly, line by line. When she reached the part about the hospital doors, her mother made a sound like a small door opening in a long hallway. “He went back,” Marlene whispered. “Arnie went back for him.”
There was more, and Marlene told it in pieces over the next three days. The night Gene died she had locked herself and the girls in the back bedroom, and when she heard the plow come up the lane at one in the morning, she had thought it was the sound of her husband coming back for revenge, not a neighbor coming back to help. Then in the morning she saw the bent blade and the blood on the snow, and in her fear she believed the worst. Fear is a strange tailor. It will sew a coat for any story if you let it.
The sheriff of that county had been dead for years, but the old hospital still had its records on microfilm in the basement of the courthouse, and a young clerk named Tessa found the page in an hour. It showed the arrival of Gene Pfeiffer at 2:25 AM on January 14, 1983, dead on arrival, cause hypothermia, brought by Arnold Lundquist, who had a laceration on his left hand requiring seven stitches. Kristin photographed the page and put it in the notebook of her mother. She said now there was a second witness, one made of paper, and paper does not forget.
Marlene died on a Friday in October, peacefully, with the window open and a thin line of sun on her blanket. A few days before, she asked to see the plow. So Kristin and I borrowed a pickup and drove to the shed behind the old county garage, where the old orange plow blade of my father still hung on the wall, bent at one corner. Marlene could no longer walk, so I held her photograph up to the metal, and she traced the dent in the air with her finger and said, “Thank you, Arnie. I am so sorry.”
That winter the first snow came early, on a Sunday, and I was awake at four listening to the plows scrape along Spruce Lane. In the morning I found a small green notebook on my porch with a note from Kristin tucked inside. It said her mother had asked that the new blade on the county plow be painted with a single word, and the road crew had agreed. I walked down to the end of the lane and saw it there on the yellow steel, small and neat, where the blade meets the road. It said ARNIE.