A Wrench Passed Down at the Rehearsal Dinner

The Monday after the funeral, a man I did not know came up our drive in an old green International pickup. He was about forty-four then, big through the shoulders, with a gray crewcut and forearms like fence posts. He wore a pressed white shirt buttoned all the way up, the way he wore it every working day of his life. It took me years to understand why: so the customer would see a man who respected his work.

He stood in our yard with his hat in his hand. My father had bought baler parts from him for fifteen years, and had owed him for the last set.

“Son,” he said, “I’m sorry about your dad. He was a square man. Do you want to work for me?”

I said I did not know anything.

“Good,” said Harold Whitcomb. “Saves me untraining you.”

That was the whole interview. I started the next morning at three dollars and fifty cents an hour, sweeping the floor of a Quonset hut out on the Nickerson road. He had written off my father’s debt the day of the funeral. I found out forty years later. He just never mentioned it.

Harold taught me everything. How to hear a bearing going bad from the cab of a pickup. How to talk to a farmer with a broken machine in the middle of cutting, when his whole year was standing out in the field turning too ripe. “You fix the man first, Tom,” he used to say. “The machine’s the easy part.”

The summer I was seventeen, a call came at four in the morning from a widow fourteen miles south, a Mrs. Garrity, with a combine down in her husband’s wheat and a storm two days out. We worked on that machine until almost dark. Harold never wrote a ticket. When she came out with an envelope, he did not take it. Driving back, I asked if he was going to charge her, and he kept his eyes on the road.

“Tom,” he said, “a man’s worth shows in what he does at four in the morning when nobody’s clapping.”

I have thought about that sentence nearly every working day since.

Harold had a boy, Rick, who was nineteen that summer and home from Kansas State, sharp as a tack. Rick did not come into the shop. He would stand in the doorway of the Quonset hut with his hands clean and his hair combed, never stepping in far enough to catch a smear on his khakis. One afternoon a farmer from Alden said to him, friendly as could be, “You gonna turn wrenches like your daddy, son?” And Rick said, in a voice I can still hear, “My dad just fixes things. I’m going to run things.”