The Name On Every Truck

By the time I was in high school, Hollis Freight and Feed ran nine trucks and held the hauling contract for the Platte Valley Co-op, which was the whole ballgame. The co-op moved everything that grew in three counties. Whoever hauled for the co-op had a business. Whoever lost the co-op had a parking lot full of trucks and a note at the bank. My father had that contract for thirty years, and he did not have it on paper in any way that would have held up if somebody wanted to fight about it. He had it because every fall he and Ray Dvorak, who ran the co-op, would sit on the tailgate of Ray’s pickup behind the elevator, and Ray would say, “Walt, you still want it?” and my father would say, “Ray, you still got it?” and they would shake hands and that was the contract. A handshake behind the elevator. That is how everything that matters in a town like Red Elm actually works, and it took me a long time to understand that Dale never understood it.

I grew up in that scale house. I learned to read a bill of lading before I learned to drive. My father used to set me on a stool by the dispatch board and let me move the little magnets around with the truck numbers on them, and I thought it was a game, and it was not a game, it was the whole nervous system of the business and I had it memorized by the time I was twelve. Where every truck was. Who was running late and why. Which driver’s wife was expecting and which driver’s mother was dying and who needed the short runs that week so he could get home. My father knew all of it, and he taught me all of it, and he used to say, “Maren, anybody can drive a truck. The trick is knowing the people.”

I met Dale Rourke when I was twenty-one, home from two years at the community college in Grand Island, working the front office for my dad. Dale came on as a driver. He was good-looking in a way that filled a doorway, and he could tell a story that made a room lean in, and I will not pretend I did not love him, because I did. We married in the Methodist church on Elm Street the summer I was twenty-three, and my father gave a toast at the Legion hall, in that same room, under those same lights, and he said he had gained a son and the company had gained a good man. My father believed that. I believed it too.