The sheriff rubbed his jaw with one big hand.
“And he’s somebody’s boy,” my mother said. “I know whose.”
Tom Hanley looked at her for a long time. Then he turned to the deputy, and to the rest of us standing there in the heat, and he told it right there on the gravel.
“Let me tell you who you had standing on this shoulder,” he said. “March of ninety-eight. I was thirty years old, and I’d been a deputy five years. I’d pulled people out of cars. I’d seen things. I thought I was a pretty tough customer.”
He put his hat back on.
“We got that blizzard. This road, right here where we’re standing, was drifted shut from the elevator to the church. My wife went into labor three weeks early at two in the morning. The ambulance went in the ditch out by the Hagen place trying to get to us. I called it in. And I couldn’t hold the phone. I mean that. I dropped it on the kitchen linoleum twice.”
