The Truck Grandpa Left Came Home
Rodney called on a Tuesday night in late September, while I was scraping the supper pan. Clint put him on speaker because his hands were greasy from the mower deck.
“It’s the transmission, son,” Rodney said. “Went out on me on the blacktop by the elevator. I had it towed in. Not worth fixing on a truck that old. I’m sorry.”
Clint stood there by the sink with a rag in his hands. He didn’t say anything for long enough that Rodney said, “You there?”
“I’m here,” Clint said. “What do you mean, not worth fixing?”
“I mean you’d put three thousand into a rebuild on a truck worth less than that. I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll get it hauled off and we’ll figure out something fair.”
Then he said he had to go, Bev was calling him for something, and the line went quiet. Clint set the phone face down on the counter, the way he does when he doesn’t want to see it light up again.
I knew what that truck was to him. Everybody in our family did. It was a 1995 Ford, maroon on top and silver along the bottom, the paint gone chalky on the hood from twenty-some Iowa summers.
His grandpa, Arnold Meyer, bought it new off the lot the fall Clint turned fifteen. Arnold drove it to the field, to church, to the sale barn on Wednesdays, and to every one of Clint’s football games for four years.
He also taught Clint to drive in it. Clint tells that story the same way every time. Gravel road north of the home place, Arnold in the passenger seat with his arm out the window, saying, “Easy, now. The road’s not going anywhere.”
When Arnold died four years ago, he was eighty-nine. He had told everybody in the family for years that the Ford went to Clint. He’d even written it on an index card and taped it inside the cupboard by his coffee.
Arnold’s place went to Bev, Clint’s mother, his only child. The truck went to Clint. Nobody argued about it. Bev cried when she handed Clint the keys at the kitchen table after the funeral lunch.
The only snag was insurance. Clint and I had a teenage boy coming up on driving age and a premium that already made me wince. Rodney said, “Put it in my name and on my policy. I’ve got the multi-vehicle discount. It’ll save you forty dollars a month, easy.”
So the title went from Arnold’s estate to Rodney Kroll. Clint kept the truck in our machine shed, drove it on Sundays, and paid Rodney the twenty-two dollars a month it added to his policy. It seemed like family doing family a kindness. It was, at the time.
I want to be fair to Rodney, because I wasn’t always. He married Bev when Clint was nine. Clint’s own father had left when he was six and sent a birthday card maybe twice after that.
Rodney was the one who showed up. He taught Clint to change his own oil, to back a trailer down a boat ramp, to sharpen a chainsaw chain with a file. He stood at the rail at every wrestling meet. Clint calls him Rodney, not Dad, but he means it the same way.
So when Rodney had called three weeks earlier and said his own pickup had a bad fuel pump and he needed to borrow the Ford to get back and forth to work for a few days, Clint didn’t think about it for one second.