The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap

All four tires were up. Somebody had aired them.

Dad’s seed cap was still on the dash, where he’d left it.

Josie walked straight over and put her hand flat on the door. I put mine on the hood. The metal was cold enough to sting.

“I didn’t buy it off your brother myself, understand,” Lyle said. “I was in Salina Tuesday after parts. My hired man took the call and went out with the rollback and wrote the check, which is his job, and then he ran it down to the crusher row, which is also his job. I came in Wednesday morning and walked the fence with my coffee like I do, and there it sat.”

He laid his hand on the hood beside mine.

“I’d know that truck in the dark,” he said.

“How?”

“Because I drove it for two weeks in the summer of 1983.”

He told it standing there in the wind, not looking at either one of us.

His father had a quarter section and forty head of cows north of the river back then, before the salvage business was anything but a sideline. That June his dad rolled a tractor on a terrace and broke his pelvis. He was in the hospital in Salina for a month and in a bed in the front room until fall. Lyle was seventeen. There were sixty acres of alfalfa and brome down and cured and ready, and one boy and his mother to get it in.

“I got it baled,” he said. “Little squares. I couldn’t get it hauled. I’d load a rack by myself till dark, and look back at that field, and not be able to tell where I’d been. I figured we were going to lose half of it to rain. If we lost the hay we’d have to sell cows, and if we sold the cows, that was that.”

“And Dad came.”

“Third evening. I didn’t call him. Nobody called him. I guess he drove by and saw one kid in a field.” Lyle nodded at the Ford. “He pulled in with that, about five years old then and still shiny, and he had two pair of gloves on the dash, and he said, ‘You drive, I’ll stack.’ Never even said hello. He came every evening for two weeks, after he’d already done his own day. Forty bales a load, back and forth to the barn until we couldn’t see. Some nights your mother came along and sat with mine.”

Josie had turned around to listen.

“When it was all in, my mother tried to give him a check. He wouldn’t take it. She tried to give him half a beef. He wouldn’t take that either. You know what he told her?”

I thought I did, but I shook my head.

“He said, ‘I’ll get it back from somebody.'” Lyle rubbed his beard. “I’ve thought about that for forty years. I never did figure out who he meant, and I don’t believe he did either.”

“So I pulled it out of the line,” he said. “I aired up the tires and dragged it over here with the loader. I was going to wait until the funeral was a few days gone, and then call one of you boys and ask what in the world you were thinking.” He looked at the strap on my shoulder and came close to smiling. “You beat me to it. And I wasn’t going to tell a thing like this over the telephone. That’s why I said come see me.”