The Boy Who Fixed My Truck

So I started doing small things. I brought a meal tray out to Ruth’s on my route days, and I would not hear no about it. I bought Micah a real set of wire strippers and a multimeter from the farm store, and I had to leave them on the porch because he tried to give them back, and I told him they were payment, back pay, for my truck, and that a debt was a debt and he of all people ought to understand that. He kept them. I saw him using the meter a week later, and I have not often in my life felt as good as I felt watching that boy touch those two probes to a wire and read the little number and nod.

But small things do not undo what a town has decided. And I might have gone on doing small things forever, and Micah might have gone on being the thief in everyone’s eyes, if it had not been for Founders Day.

Harmon does Founders Day the second Saturday in August, out at the city park by the ball fields, and the whole county comes. There is a pulled pork feed and a horseshoe tournament and the fire department gives kids rides on the truck, and that year the Baptist church had chartered the old activity bus to bring their youth group and a load of the little league team over from the county seat for the afternoon. It was a hot day, and by four o’clock folks were starting to think about heading home, and that yellow bus was idling in the gravel lot with two dozen sunburned kids climbing aboard, and it died. Just quit. Same as my truck, I found out later. Every light, then nothing.

The driver cranked it and cranked it and got nothing but a click, and a crowd gathered the way a crowd will, and pretty soon Garrett Kessler came shouldering through, because Garrett was the car man in Harmon and this was his moment and everybody expected it of him. He threw up the engine cover at the back of that bus and stood there with his hands on his hips and his belly out, narrating, the way he does, telling everybody it was surely the starter, surely the solenoid, and he had a man send to the shop for tools, and he leaned in there and got grease to his elbows and could not find a thing, and the longer it went the redder his face got and the quieter the crowd got, and those kids were getting hot and one of the littlest ones started to cry, and the church was talking about calling parents to come all the way from the county seat.