The Widow Who Learned Three On The Tree
“Second is back up to the middle, let it spring away from you, and up. Third is straight down from there. Reverse is toward you and up. That’s all there is. It’s just a capital H lying on its side.”
“My daddy never said that about the H.”
“Granddad didn’t either. I figured it out.”
Then he showed me the choke. The knob with the C.
“She’s cold, so you pull that all the way out. Push the gas to the floor one time and let off. That sets it. Now turn the key.”
The engine caught on the second turn and ran fast and rough, and the whole cab shook, and the smell came up, warm oil and old vinyl and a little raw gasoline.
That smell was Dale walking in the back door at supper. It went through me so hard I had to hold the wheel.
Tyler waited. He looked out his side window at the hedge post until I was done.
“As she warms up, you push the choke in,” he said, when I had my breath. “Halfway after a minute. All the way when she smooths out. If you forget, she’ll run rich and load up and smoke black, and she’ll tell on you.”
“Dale forgot once. In front of the church.”
“Everybody forgets once.”
Then came the part my daddy could not teach me.
“Let the clutch up slow,” Tyler said. “Slower than you think. There’s a spot where you feel her start to pull. When you feel that, hold your foot right there and give her a little gas.”
I let the clutch up.
The truck bucked like a calf on a rope and died.
“Everybody does that,” Tyler said. “Clutch in. Key.”
I killed it again. And again.
I killed that truck eleven times that first evening. I counted, because I am a person who counts. I counted trays for twenty-nine years.
Tyler said “Everybody does that” eleven times, in the same voice, and not once did the corner of his mouth move.
On the twelfth try the truck rolled forward. It simply went, smooth, like a boat leaving a dock, and I was driving my husband’s pickup across eleven acres of cheatgrass at about six miles an hour with both hands locked on the wheel.
“There she is,” Tyler said quietly.
I drove to the hedge post. Then I had to turn, and I found out what no power steering means. At six miles an hour that wheel turns like the lid on a pressure canner. I leaned into it with my whole shoulders.
“It’s easier the faster you’re rolling,” Tyler said. “Never try and turn it sitting still. You’ll wear yourself out.”
“Dale had arms like fence posts.”
“That’s why.”
We went out every afternoon he was not working late, and I went out by myself every morning.
I learned second gear by the end of the first week. The truck has no tachometer, so you shift by ear. Tyler said to listen for when she sounded like she was asking.
And in second gear, between about fifteen and twenty-five miles an hour, that truck sings. It is a high steady whine out of the transmission, like a teakettle a room away.
The first time I heard it from the driver’s seat I took my foot clean off the gas.
“Something wrong?” Tyler said.
“No.”