The Night I Towed His Cadillac Home

The work

I put a meter on the battery first. It read ten point nine volts, which is a dead battery in any language. I put it on the charger on the slow setting, and while it came up, I jumped it from the shop pack and got the engine running long enough to check what the alternator was putting out.

Twelve point one at the battery, engine running. A healthy charging system shows around fourteen. This one was not charging at all.

“Is it bad?” Harlan asked.

“It’s an alternator. It’s not a death in the family.”

I heard what I’d said a second too late. I looked over at him. He was looking at the floor. “I’m sorry, Harlan. That was a careless thing to say.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all right. Margaret would have laughed at that.” He took a sip of the coffee. “She thought you were funny. Did you know that?”

I did not know that. I went back to work.

There is no parts store open in our county at one in the morning, and the one in town does not open until seven. But the alternator on that Cadillac is a Delco, the same family of Delco I had rebuilt on a few hundred tractors and grain trucks. I keep brush sets and bearings in the third drawer of the bench for exactly that reason.

I loosened the serpentine belt with a breaker bar on the tensioner, unplugged the harness, and pulled the two mounting bolts. The alternator came out with a little coaxing. I set it on the bench under the lamp and split the case.

“Come look at this,” I said.

Harlan climbed down off the stool, slow, and came over in my coat with his hands in the pockets. I showed him the brushes, worn down to almost nothing, and the slip rings, grooved and black where the brushes ride. “That’s twenty-seven years of driving to church and the bank and back,” I said. “It just ran out of brush.”

He leaned in close, the way a man looks at a ledger. “And you can make that new again?”

“Close enough to new. New brushes, a new bearing, clean up the rings. It’ll outlast the car.”

He nodded, and then he stayed. He did not go back to the stool. He stood beside me at the bench in my coat for most of an hour, watching me polish the slip rings with emery cloth on the lathe and press the new bearing on, and every so often he asked what a thing was called. I told him.

Three in the morning

Around three, I took a break and poured the last of Julie’s coffee into two cups. We ate lemon bars standing up. The heater ticked overhead.

“My father was a hired man,” Harlan said, out of nowhere. “Did Julie ever tell you that?”

“She said he farmed.”

“He farmed other people’s ground. He was a hired man for the Bremer family west of Lake Crystal for twenty-six years.” He turned the cup in his hands.

“Every time old Mr. Bremer came out to the barn, my father took his hat off. Every time. I watched it from the haymow when I was six years old, and I promised myself I’d be the man the hats came off for.”

I did not say anything. I let him go on.

“I started as a teller at the bank in 1962. Made president in 1979. Thirty-one years at that desk before I retired. And you know what I learned? A title is the only wall between your family and the barn. That’s what I thought, anyhow. That’s what I was sure of.”