The woman in the snow dusted coat set the little wooden box on the casket of my father, and the antenna wobbled and was still. She looked down at him for a while, and when she spoke it was in a voice I knew, though I had never seen her face. It was the voice that used to come out of the radio in his truck at all hours, calm and low, saying copy that, Frank. “My name is Margaret Lund,” she said. “I was the county dispatcher for thirty one years. For thirty one years I talked your father through every storm that ever came across Sweetwater County.” She laid her palm on the lid of the box. “Today is the first time I have seen his face.”
She turned to the folding chairs, to the plow drivers in their orange jackets and the highway patrolmen with their hats in their hands. “I want to tell you about one night,” she said. “It was January the fourth, 1996. Eleven below. A school bus with fourteen children went off Highway 191 near Eden, and the driver radioed that the heater was dead and the engine would not turn.” She took a breath. “Frank was the closest plow. Nineteen miles. Whiteout. He told me, Maggie, I can not see the road, but I can feel it. And he drove it blind, with me on the radio, calling out the mile markers, one at a time, for fifty one minutes.”
There was no sound in the funeral home but a single heater, ticking. My stepmother Darlene, in the back, had put a hand to her mouth. “He got there,” said Margaret. “He parked the plow across the road to block the wind, and then he walked down the embankment and carried every one of those children up to the cab, three at a time. He gave them his coat, his gloves, his thermos. And when the ambulance arrived, he was sitting in the snow with a child in each arm, singing. He could not remember a single song, so he sang the one about the old gray mare.” She smiled through tears. “Fourteen children. Not one frostbitten finger.”
A radio box with a short antenna was carried to a casket and gave one son the morning to bring his stepmother home to the road.
I had not known. My father never told me, not a word. He had come home that night, I now remembered, in the gray hours before dawn, and had sat at the kitchen table in his coat, and my mother had made him tea. All these years later, in a room with forty folding chairs, I understood that the whole of my childhood had been lit by something that he never once turned toward me. Margaret opened the little box. Inside, nestled in foam, was an old reel to reel tape. “I kept the recording,” she said. “May I play the last minute?”
She set it on a small player that someone had brought, and pressed the button. A hiss, a crackle, and then, from the speaker, the voice of my father, thinned by thirty years and static, but unmistakable. Maggie, I got them, I got every one, I am holding a little girl who will not let go of my neck. And then the voice of Margaret, younger, trembling: Copy, Frank. Copy that. Thank God. Thank God. The room was utterly still. On the speaker, a small thin voice rose, a child, saying clearly: Mister, are you a snowman?
They laughed, all of them, through their tears. It was a wet, broken laugh, and I laughed with them, and then I was crying so hard that my shoulders shook, and a hand fell on my back, a big square hand in a work glove. It was the plow driver from the next county, a man I did not know. “Your dad was the best man on a road I ever met,” he said. “He taught me to drive in snow. I wanted to tell you, but I never knew how.” Behind him, in the aisle, a young woman, perhaps thirty, stood with her fist against her lips. “I was the girl on the neck,” she said.
Her name was Kayla Brewer, and she was a nurse at the hospital in Rock Springs now, and she said she had spent half her life looking for the man who sang about the old gray mare. She came forward and stood before the casket. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she took a small thing from her coat pocket, a tarnished brass button, and she laid it on the box with the radio. “He gave me his coat,” she said. “This was on the cuff. I have kept it in my pocket for twenty nine years.” My stepmother Darlene, in the back row, made a sound like a small animal.
She came forward at last, in her good wool coat, walking slowly between the chairs, and she stopped in front of me. Her eyes were swollen and her mouth was trembling. “Brandon,” she said, “I have been a hard woman. I said forty chairs were plenty. I said he plowed roads.” She looked at the tape player, at the dead radio, at the box. “I did not know who I was married to. I thought I did. I never asked.” I did not know what to say. So I did what he would have done, I think. I held out my arms.
We moved the service that afternoon to the Elks lodge, where the highway department put on a lunch of chili and cornbread, and the plow drivers parked their trucks along the street with their yellow lights spinning. They drove out in a convoy at dusk, forty trucks in a line, to the cemetery on the hill, and in the blue dark they raised their blades together in salute, in perfect silence, as the casket was lowered. Margaret Lund stood beside me. She rested the little radio in the crook of her arm. When the last shovel of earth fell, she raised the microphone to her lips, as she must have done ten thousand times.
“Dispatch to Frank,” she said, softly, into the cold. The wind moved through the pines. “All clear. Come on home.” I closed my eyes. Somewhere, I swear it, down the long white road toward the interstate, a single plow light blinked twice and went out. Darlene took my arm. I took hers. We stood there together in the snow, a son and a stepmother, and for the first time in twelve years she did not let go of me, and neither of us said a word, because it was a copy, and it was understood.