Farhead and the Angels
Farhead sweated under his several layers of clothing, yet his hands and face were freezing in the wind that swirled wisps of snow along his long driveway, only the half of which he had cleared with his shovel.
"Please tell me why," he said, addressing the drifts still before him, "you started out so soft and turned so hard."
"No, I don't mean you," he continued, as in his mind's eye his wife's image arose with an accusing look marring her beauty. "Although I could. I certainly could."
He looked down the road where other driveways were being cleared with snowblowers and snow plows. He would have hired one of them, but Nearheart had said no. "You need the exercise," she had said. "You're getting all pudgy sitting there at that computer all the time."
The drifts increasingly defied his efforts as the temperature dropped and the wind increased. Finally he said, "Damn it!" and jumped on the shovel head to try and make it break through. The head bit through the first few inches of crust but then stuck. He leaned back with all his weight on the handle to lever free whatever he could. Then the handle snapped and he fell backwards and landed hard on the ground he had already cleared.
Many curses came to mind, wanting like sheep to play follow the leader, but he took a deep breath and let them ride on that into the wind as he exhaled.
He was lying there still, resting and even enjoying the play of the sun on the snow all the way down the seemingly infinite stretch of his driveway, when a man in a truck with a snowplow arrived and said someone named Nearheart had hired him and did he need a hand up.
Later he said to his wife, somewhat amazed, "You told him you were Nearheart. I thought you hated that. You said never call you that again."
She sat behind him in the bathtub, shampooing his hair. "I called myself that," she said. "To you I'm Eileen. At least until you hear different. Now shut your eyes. It's time to rinse."
Hell and Heaven, Farhead thought, and on the same day. What a wonder! And he relaxed and shut his eyes and let his Nearheart pour the cleansing water over him and gave thanks that the angels had rediscovered him and made a fervent wish that this time they would stay a while.
18 January 2022
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca