The Feed Truck I Drove Home

“I asked your dad twice for that east eighty. It lays right against me. I’d have paid him fair both times. He said his father bought it in 1961 with hog money and he would not be the one to sell it.” Butch straightened up off the wire. “I’m just telling you that offer never went anywhere.”

I was greasing the feed truck that evening. It was past eight and still light, the long June light that makes everything look better than it is. I had the grease gun on the driveline when I heard gravel.

It was Dad’s pickup. The blue three-quarter-ton with the cracked tail light. For half a second, coming up my lane with the sun behind it, it was him.

Phil got out slow. Mud to the ankles on those new boots. He walked across the yard and stopped beside the running board of the feed truck, and he looked up at the cab, at the windshield, and I knew he could see the gloves.

Then my brother took off his cap.

I had never seen him take it off to ask for anything. Not for a loan, not for a girl, not at our mother’s bedside.

“Wade,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”

I wiped my hands. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at out there.” His voice was steady, but it cost him. “I know it’s bad. I don’t know how bad, and I don’t know what to do first. Would you come look at it?”

Four months I had waited for that sentence. I had planned, some nights, what I would say back. Most of it was not Christian.

Standing there, what I saw was a man in his fifties holding his cap in both hands in front of his little brother. I did not have any of those speeches left in me.

“Saturday,” I said. “I work till noon.”

He let his breath out.

“I’ll pay you whatever you say.”

“You’ll pay the co-op for the spray and the nitrogen. That’ll be enough of a bill.” I hung the grease gun on its nail. “And Phil. I’ll look at it. I’m not saying more than that yet.”

“That’s fair.”

“Why Kansas?”

He turned the cap around once in his hands.

“Because they didn’t know me,” he said. “I couldn’t ask you. And everybody else around here would’ve known I hadn’t asked you.”

It was an honest answer. It was also the same answer I had given Theresa in April with the words turned around.

“Saturday,” I said again.

He nodded, and he looked one more time at the windshield, and then he drove our father’s pickup back down the lane.

Saturday I was off at noon and home by a quarter past. I ate standing up. What I needed before I went over there was the green notebook, because the pivot panel was throwing a fault and Dad had written down every fault that machine ever threw and what he did about it.

It was not in the shop when I cleaned out my tools in March. I had looked. That left the truck.

Dad kept his things on the passenger side. Under the bench over there was where the log chain lived, and the jumper cables, and whatever else he did not want his boys borrowing. In four months of driving that truck twice a day, I had never once reached under that side of the seat. It was still his side. I had not touched the cap, either.

I got down on the running board and reached under.