The Tools That Came Home Early

“Buy it back.”

“I swear to God.”

“You couldn’t have bought it back at $4,300, Rudy. You took $2,400 for a truck that’s worth twice that, and Gil Fogle got the tools for fifteen cents on the dollar.”

He put his face in his hand.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said into his palm.

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that I knew exactly what was the matter with him, and so did he.

I’ll be honest. In that moment I wanted to take him by the collar and put him against the side of that shed. Heath would have, and with reason. But Verle Ogden was standing six feet from us, slowly drying his hands on a red rag, and his eyes were on me, not on Rudy.

He gave me one small shake of the head.

Not here. Not like that.

Verle walked over and sat down on the porch step beside Rudy, a 70-year-old man in coveralls with a lifetime of grease in his knuckles, as comfortably as if they were friends.

“Rudy, I’m not going to holler at you,” he said. “There’s two people in this world I’d holler at, and one of them is dead.”

Rudy said nothing.

“Teri’s called me. She said you’re out of this house by dark. She didn’t say it unkindly. Your brother in Barton is coming for you at five.” Verle handed him a clean rag for his hands. “When that bus gets here, you’re going to say it to the boy yourself. Not ‘it was an accident.’ Not ‘I was going to fix it.’ What you did, in your own words. After that you’re going to go.”

“He’ll hate me.”

“He might. That part’s not yours to fix. What you say is.”

At 3:20 a green Chevrolet came up the lane with a man in a seed cap at the wheel.

I knew him. Clyde Bakke, 74, who farms four hundred acres out past the Lutheran church and who sat three pews behind us at Heath’s funeral. He stopped at the edge of the yard and climbed out slowly with a cardboard box.

“Which one of you is Kenny?” he called.

“I am.”

“Gil Fogle phoned my wife,” said Clyde. “Said I’d bought something I shouldn’t have. I’d have called myself, but I don’t carry one of those phones.”

He set the box on the tailgate of my truck. Inside, in a nest of shop towels, were the half-inch torque wrench and the three-quarter drive set. Heath had put his initials on the handles with an electric pencil, HW, in the careful little capitals he used on everything he owned.

“I paid a hundred and forty,” Clyde said. “I’d like you to have them back. No charge.”

“Clyde, I can pay you.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” He looked at the pegboard, at the men standing in the open shed. “Heath rebuilt the hydraulic pump on my baler on a Sunday in August because the hay was down and rain was coming. Wouldn’t take a nickel.” He shrugged. “I got off easy.”

Verle came up behind me and looked in the box.

“Second drawer from the top,” he said. “Left side. Heath kept the drive sets there.”

I carried it across the yard myself.

When I came out, Verle was standing beside Gil’s truck with his hands on his hips, and I understood what he was about to do before he said it.