Forty Acres Deep by Michael Perry

Author:Michael Perry [Perry, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Forty Acres Deep
Publisher: Sneezing Cow, Inc.
Published: 2022-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

He clunked the truck into four-wheel-drive and surveyed the scene. Nothing but uncut white. It had always been one of his favorite things, plowing out that first run. Closest you could get in this day and age to striking out for the territories like in the cowboy books. It would be tough going, but because the driveway followed the ridge and cut through trees, it didn’t collect snow like the space between the pole barns.

He dropped the plow, gunned the engine, and barged forward. A plume of snow exploded off the blade and curled through the air. Having lain so long, the snow had packed and settled, and the truck was laboring. He stuffed the accelerator to the floor and let it roar.

He hit a particularly solid drift, and snow billowed backward and into the windshield. The defroster was blowing hot, and the snow clung like paste to the glass. Running blind, he switched the wipers on, and they swept the slush aside. It was a moment of literal clarity, and he reveled in the beauty of the laden boughs overhanging the unsullied lane before him. Another drift, another blinding burst of white, and soon the wipers began to clack-clack, a sign they were getting gobbed with ice. It’d get to where they looked like one of those rock sugar lollipops. He lowered the window and reached around the door post, snatching at the wiper when it reached the end of its arc, snapping it against the glass to break loose the frozen slush.

He was nearly to the mailbox now. By reflex he veered leftward to check the contents, then recalled he had stopped the mail two weeks after she died. Called and told the postmaster he and the wife were taking another trip to Hawaii. It was an exhilarating lie and utterly out of character.

He broke through to the county road, raised the plow, and in his first moment off the farm since her death, felt afloat and untethered, as if he had been cut loose in space. Rather than drive, he sat idled on the centerline.

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