The Feed Truck I Drove Home

“I know you didn’t.”

“I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“I don’t either.”

He opened his mouth to say something more, and I could see it was something hard, and I could see him decide not to. He nodded and walked to his car.

I let him go. I have thought about that a good deal since. If either one of us had said one more sentence on that sidewalk, we would have saved ourselves four months. But we were Albert’s sons, both of us, and Albert’s sons did not say the extra sentence.

I drove out to the home place that afternoon to get what was mine.

The truck sat in the north bay of the machine shed, where Dad had backed it in the evening of the second of February after he fed the calves. He died the next night in his chair with the market report on. I found him in the morning when he didn’t come out to the lots.

So the truck was parked the way he parked it. Nosed out. Wheels straight.

It was white once. Thirty winters had turned it to chalk, and the doors still had the ghost of a seed dealer’s name where a decal had come off. It had the 466 diesel, a five-speed with a two-speed axle, and a mixer box on the back with a dent in the discharge chute from the morning in 2003 when Dad caught the corner of a bunk and said a word my mother made him apologize to the dog for.

I climbed up and sat behind the wheel.

His chore gloves were on the dash. Yellow leather gone brown, laid one on top of the other, and curled. They were curled exactly the shape of his hands on a steering wheel. I sat there and looked at them until the windshield fogged.

There was a seed corn cap on the passenger side of the bench and a pair of fencing pliers on the floor. The cab smelled like ground corn and diesel and the peppermints he kept in his shirt pocket to cover the fact that he still chewed after the doctor told him to quit.

It was plugged in, so it started. I unplugged it, coiled the cord on the hook the way he did, and drove it eleven miles home at forty-five miles an hour with the heater roaring and my father’s gloves riding on the dash in front of me.

I did not move them. I have not moved them yet.

Theresa and I live on seven acres on the Elba road, a house and a barn and two lots we bought the year we married. I parked the truck beside the barn. She came out in her coat and stood looking at it.

“Well,” she said. “It’s paid for.”

“It’s the only thing out there that is, probably.”

I meant it as a joke. I did not know yet that I had said my father’s own sentence.

The harder part came the next morning. I had forty cows of my own. I had built that herd up from six bred heifers Dad sold me at cost when I was twenty-nine, and they had always run on his creek pasture in the summer and his cornstalks in the winter. That was the deal between us. I drew a wage, I ran my cows on his grass, and I never once asked to see the books.

Now it was Phil’s grass and Phil’s stalks.