The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap
“I’ll go to the bank Monday and get it out,” he said. “It’s yours. You’re out nine hundred.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Well, I sure don’t. I never wanted the money. I wanted the truck gone.” He turned the slip around with one finger. “Kim is going to want to know what happened to that girl’s braces.”
“Kim is going to want to know a lot of things.”
Josie had brought the bundles in and had them spread out on the oilcloth. She pushed one ticket across to her uncle, and then another. The ones with other people’s names. Stamped paid, with a year on the back.
Rick went through all eleven. He is quicker than I am. He had it before he got to the end.
“That’s where it went,” he said. “Every fall I’d wonder why we came up short right about the time we settled at the co-op, and he’d say he must have figured wrong.” He almost laughed. “That old man never figured wrong in his life.”
“Lyle said Dad told his mother he’d get it back from somebody.”
“That sounds like him.”
We both thought of the same place at the same time. I could see it on him.
There is a young couple a mile and a half east of us, Jeff and Amy. They rent their ground, and they have two little boys. In October Jeff went off the side of a grain bin and broke his back in two places. He is going to walk, but he isn’t going to farm this winter, and maybe not next spring. Rick and four other men drilled his wheat for him the week before Dad died. Dad rode along in Rick’s pickup and watched from the end rows.
The seed for that wheat was still on Jeff’s bill at the co-op. Everybody knew it. Nobody had known what to do about it.
“Nine hundred won’t cover all of it,” Rick said.
“It’ll cover the most of it.”
“I’ll put the rest with it.” He folded the slip. “And I am putting back every dollar of that braces money, and you are not going to argue with me, because I’m older than you and I’m tired.”
I let him. There is a time to stand on a thing, and there is a time to take what your brother is trying to hand you.
Rick went to the co-op Monday morning. He told the girl at the counter to mark Jeff’s seed ticket paid and not to say who. She said, “Just like your dad,” and he had to go sit in his truck a minute before he could drive home.
He brought the yellow copy out to the shed that night. He got the pencil stub out of the glove box and wrote the year on the back, and he banded it in with the other eleven.
We worked on the Ford all winter. Saturdays, and some weeknights when I could get away.
It wasn’t anything fancy. A truck that has sat for two years mostly needs to be forgiven. We dropped the tank and drained out gas that had turned the color of iced tea. I put on a new fuel pump and a filter. Josie and I took the carburetor apart on the workbench and laid every piece out on a shop towel in the order it came off, and she scrubbed the jets with a toothbrush while I told her what each one did. A new battery. Plugs, wires, cap and rotor. Belts and hoses, because rubber doesn’t keep. Rick did the brakes, both rear wheel cylinders, lying on a piece of cardboard on that cold floor and saying things to them under his breath that I won’t write down.