The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap
So that is how it went. I backed my pickup down to the edge of the yard. Lyle crawled under the front of the Ford himself and hooked the strap to the frame, not the bumper, and then he checked my end and didn’t like it and did it over. He set a portable air tank in my bed in case the right rear went down, which it was thinking about.
Rick stood at the driver’s door of the Ford with the key in his hand for what felt like a full minute.
Then he opened it, and it squawked, and he got in behind our father’s wheel and pulled the door shut.
I watched him through the windshield. He put both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way Dad taught us, and sat looking at the cap on the dash. Then he turned the key far enough to free the column, and shoved the stick into neutral, and lifted two fingers off the wheel to tell me he was ready.
Lyle slapped my fender twice. “Slow,” he said. “Keep it tight. He’ll do the stopping. You just don’t surprise him.”
“Lyle. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Then don’t. Go on. Get him home.”
I didn’t know which one he meant, the truck or my father or my brother. I have decided it was all three.
We went the back way, down the old highway to the county road and then south on gravel, with the flashers going, at twenty miles an hour. Nine miles took us the better part of forty minutes.
Josie rode backward on her knees the whole way, watching through the rear glass.
“He’s doing good,” she would say. “He’s keeping it tight.” And once, about halfway, very quiet: “Dad, I think Uncle Rick is crying.”
“Then turn around and give him his privacy.”
She turned around for about a quarter mile.
We passed the corner where Dad put the Ford in the ditch two years ago, where the corner post is still new wood, and I watched in my mirror and saw my brother not look at it.
At the home place I swung wide through the yard and pulled it right up to the machine shed, to the empty bay with the oil spot on the concrete in the exact shape of that truck. Rick stood on the brake and we stopped with the strap still tight. Neither one of us had jerked it once in nine miles. Dad would have had something to say about that. He would have said it on a seed ticket.
I unhooked. Josie climbed straight into the cab, opened the glove box, and went back to reading.
Rick got out and shut the door and walked around the front of the truck. He stopped at the caved-in fender. He leaned on it with both hands and hung his head.
I waited. I am better at that than most.
“I couldn’t look at it,” he said.
“All right.”
“No. Let me say it. I’ve been all week not saying it.” He rubbed his thumb along the crease in the metal. “You know how this got here.”
“He missed the corner.”
“He missed the corner because he couldn’t see the corner. He hadn’t been able to see right out of that eye since spring, and he hadn’t told a soul. I was the one that found him. Sitting in the ditch with the motor still running, mad as a hornet, trying to back it out.” Rick’s voice was flat, the feed sack voice, but it was costing him. “I reached in and shut it off and I took the keys. Out of his hand, Tom. I took our father’s keys out of his hand.”