The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap
“There’s something else,” Lyle said. “I went in the glove box Wednesday, looking for the registration. I shut it right back. That’s not mine to go through. But before you pay me a dime, you need to see what your dad kept in here.”
He opened the passenger door. It squawked on the same old hinge. The cab smelled the way it always had, dust and oil and wintergreen, and it nearly took my knees out from under me.
He thumbed the button and the glove box dropped open.
It was full of paper. Seed tickets from the co-op, the yellow carbon copies they hand you across the counter. Forty years of them, by the look of it, rubber-banded in bundles gone soft as cloth. On top sat a carpenter’s pencil, sharpened with a pocketknife down to a stub no longer than my thumb.
My father did not keep a diary. He would have laughed at the word. But he was forever working figures on whatever was in reach, and what was in reach, in that truck, was seed tickets.
“Go on,” Lyle said, and he walked off a few steps and found something to look at on the loader.
I took the first bundle and slid the band off. Josie climbed up on the seat beside me.
The fronts were what you would expect. Seed wheat, so many bushels. Milo. Alfalfa seed one year. The backs were Dad. Columns of pencil numbers, acres and pounds and what it would all come to. A rain total. “Call vet.” “Donna’s birthday Thursday, do not forget again.”
And then, here and there, things that were not figures at all.
One from the spring of 1989, the pencil pressed hard. “Rick drove her in from the east field by himself. Ten years old. Killed it twice. Got it the third time and did not quit.”
I read that one out loud. I don’t know why.
Josie was into the next bundle. “Dad. Here’s you.”
It was from September of 1995. “Tommy took her through all four gears on the section road. Never ground a one. He has the hands for it.”
I was ten. I remember the day. I remember the gearshift knob and how it buzzed in my palm. I did not know he had gone and written it down. He never said one word to me about my hands in his whole life.
There were more. The day Mom’s tests came back clean the first time, only the date and “Thank you.” The day they didn’t, only the date. One that said, “Josie born, 6 lbs 11 oz. Tom looks scared to death. He will do fine.”
My daughter read that one twice. Then she put it very carefully back in the stack, like it was something that might break.
And there was another kind mixed in. Tickets that were not his. Other names typed on the customer line, people I knew. A neighbor two miles over. A widow from church. A family that farmed next to us in the eighties and went under anyway. Each one was stamped paid. On the back of each, in his hand, was only a year.
I counted eleven of those before I quit counting.
I banded them all back the way they had been and shut the glove box and got out of the truck. Then I stood with my back to my daughter until the wind had dried my face.
Lyle came back over when he judged it was time.
“He paid seed bills,” I said. “For people.”