The snowplow operator arrives at the county garage before the storm starts. In the parking lot the sky is grey and angry, and his breath swirls around him in the wind like smoke. Inside, and after making coffee in the little ancient coffee machine, he takes a folding chair out of the closet and sets it next to the window. There is some pride in being the only one awake.
The referendum passed to close the junior-senior high school and combine it with the next city over. The snowplow operator would occasionally drive past the school during the day and see it completely empty. He tries now to recall being at school, but it all seems so foreign to him, like a movie. He remembers some classes, some teachers, though he is sure that they all have passed away by now. He remembers Frau Smith and her German lessons, and he had been able to retain that German for so long. But without youthful memory or use, he had lost it all, barely even noticing until one day the words escaped him.
At his age, there is no state other than exhaustion, and it becomes a baseline for the world itself. As the world became more fuzzy, it also became more grey and cold. It never used to snow here. Two years ago, the town scrounged together enough money to add a single snowplow to the school district bus barn and pay the operator minimum wage each day that it snowed. Henry Stellmaker the farmhand, the store clerk, the retiree, then the snowplow operator.
As a younger and more energetic man each Christmas Eve, he would cut through Schmidt’s harvested corn fields to a little fenced plot which held the New York pioneer cemetery. He would find the Stellmaker graves and sing them Macht hoch die Tür and Stille Nacht. It was only after the derecho took down the shed and the crops that Schmidt sold the land to a developer who leveled it all for houses, each newly finished and like teeth in the horizon.
The snowplow operator cannot help but wonder if it has always been like this. There has been no New York, Missouri for over 150 years. He imagines himself like one of those last pioneers, silently watching the name of his home changed by the young men and women who never knew the people who founded the town. Their hopes and plans for the acres of land, now below houses, their ears only hearing a language that they cannot understand.
It is integral that each main road be passable so the residents can leave to their various jobs and responsibilities. The snowplow operator imagines himself sometimes as a shepherd silently leading them by lamplight through the snow and ice. They still complain when the plow is slow or the snow pushes up and creates a mound in front of their driveway or car.
The wind picks up outside and lightly rattles the windowpane. The snow begins to fall. It is time to get up and begin the rounds down the streets of the town that was once New York. The coffee pot goes silent and all is ready.
He remembers making coffee for his father on the stovetop: the way his father would smile and gently take the hot saucer, always thanking him and telling him it was good coffee, even when he burned it. At the store, he would stand on his tiptoes, reaching his little hands up for a tin, which his family would always get for him to make despite rationing.
This exhaustion is overcoming him, and the darkness of the night makes the town seem as if it is no longer for him, that one day he woke up in a different place with a different name and different people in it. He lies down on the floor and decides to nap; let the earth do as the earth does, let it blanket itself with snow. He is old now. If they sleep, shouldn’t he be allowed to as well?
With his eyes closed, he begins to hum a tune, imagining the words in German, though he no longer fully remembers them. He feels the hard CHs and Ts, and the soft consonants that float between them like cold breath in winter. There is another sound, almost like a snowplow, though it is only the furnace kicking in as snow rests between wind gusts on the blacktop outside.
