February Ice In The Pickup Bed
February came in the way it always comes in, with a sky the color of galvanized tin and a wind that had traveled a long way to get here and intended to be noticed. The pickups on Main ran their heaters at idle while the men inside them went nowhere. Ice stood in the beds of the trucks in hard black sheets that would not melt until March.
In the pickup bed
the ice has taken the shape
of the truck bed itself,
a negative memory,
a coffin lid
of the week that was.
It holds
a strand of bale twine,
a single leather glove,
a hex bolt
somebody dropped in October
and gave up on.
These are now
under the ice
like specimens.
The truck does not mind.
The truck is used to carrying
what the year left in it.
It will be driven
to the feed store
and the feed store
will not mention it.
A boy with a hammer
could free the glove
in four clean blows
but the boy is in school
and the glove has been there
since November
and what is another month
to a glove.
The cold snap pushed into the second week, and out at the Hollander place a heifer dropped a calf at three in the morning in a shed where the door would not close all the way. Ray Hollander stood with a towel in each hand and did what his father had done and his father's father had done, and in the morning he came into the feed store for molasses and looked like a man who had not slept but had won.
He said to the widow,
She's up.
The widow said,