The Truck Grandpa Left Came Home

I wore my tan barn coat over a gray hoodie and my good jeans. Colton wore his black hoodie and a pair of work gloves stuck in the front pocket, the way his dad does. Neither of us said much on the drive.

The Hartwig place sat on a hill a mile off the blacktop. A red barn, older than anybody there, and a long steel machine shed with the doors rolled open. Cars and pickups were parked along the ditch for a quarter mile.

Farm sales have a feel to them I grew up with. The church ladies selling sloppy joes and pie out of a trailer. Old men in seed caps standing in little knots, talking yields. Somebody’s kid running between the hay racks lined with box lots.

There were maybe forty people standing in the gravel when we walked up, with more coming. Most of them were in caps and canvas jackets, hands in their pockets against the wind.

I went to the clerk’s trailer and showed my driver’s license to a woman with reading glasses on a chain. She wrote my name in a ledger and handed me a white card with a number printed big and black on it.

Number 147.

“Terms are cash or good check, day of sale,” she said. “Titles are handed over when the check clears. Anything you buy is yours when the hammer drops, so keep an eye on it.”

“Do you know when the vehicles go?” I asked.

“Merle likes to sell the pickups after the small tractors,” she said. “Should be about eleven. They’re lined up by the hay wagon.”

I folded the card in half and put it in my coat pocket. My hands were cold and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my ears.

Colton saw the truck before I did. He touched my sleeve and nodded toward the yard.

It was parked behind a flatbed hay wagon near the machine shed, nose toward the crowd. Maroon and silver, chalky on the hood, the little dent in the tailgate from the time Arnold backed into a gatepost and blamed the gatepost.

Somebody had washed it. The tires were dressed. It looked better than it had in our shed. For one awful second I thought, he took better care of it than we did, and then I thought, he took care of it so it would bring more money.

Colton walked over and put his hand flat on the fender, the way you’d put your hand on a horse. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his hand on it until I said his name.

That’s when I saw the brown work jacket.

Rodney was standing near the front of the crowd, a few feet to my right, in his old seed cap and that brown jacket Bev had bought him at Farm and Fleet for his sixtieth birthday. He had his hands in his pockets.

He saw me. I watched him see me. His face didn’t change much, but all the color left it, and then he looked down at the gravel between his boots and kept looking at it.

I didn’t go over to him. I didn’t say a word. I had thought all the way there about what I might say if I saw him, and when the moment came, there wasn’t one thing worth saying out loud.

Colton came back and stood beside me, close. He’s taller than me now, which still surprises me every time.

“That’s Grandpa Rodney,” he said quietly.

“I know, honey.”

“Is he selling it?”

“His name’s on the paper,” I said. “It’s his to sell.”