The Last Load Out of Delmore

“Ansel,” he said. “Be reasonable.”

“I’m being reasonable. I’m telling you what I’ll do.”

He did not believe me. I do not blame him. I had never in my life made a stand of any kind. I was a man who hauled his load and went home. I went out to my truck and shook for ten minutes with my hands on the wheel.

Then I did what I said. For nine months I did not haul one pound for the Delmore co-op. It cost me close to a third of my income, in a year when we had a daughter in college. Luanne never said a word about it. She took in sewing, and when I sat down at the kitchen table on the night I told her what I’d done, she said only, “I wondered when you’d finally say something to that man.”

What finally moved Merlin was not me. A rancher named Roy Welch with a hundred head of heifers to move asked for “the Stucky girl” by name, and when Merlin looked at his dispatch sheet and the empty slots where my name should have been, it came down to arithmetic. It usually does.

On a Monday morning in June, Jodene hauled her first load of cattle out of Delmore. Eighty-two head of heifers, to a feedlot in Ellsworth County. She was perfect. She has been perfect, more or less, since.

Merlin retired in 2002. A week before he did, he came to our house on a Sunday in a clean shirt and said, “I was wrong, Ansel. I wanted somebody to hear me say it.” Luanne gave him pie. He ate all of it.

Today she owns three trucks and an office in Salina, and a dozen drivers work for her, three of them women. She was fifty-six that morning, and she stood on the side of a county road with her cap in her hand and hit her own tire.

Then I came over the next rise at Quail Road, and there was a pickup on the shoulder, a white Ford with a wheelchair ramp built into the tailgate, and next to it, in the chair, with a blanket on his knees, a man I had known for forty years.

Kirby Nance. He was seventy-one that fall, and he looked every day of it. He had his own thumper laid across his lap, the burned name toward me so I could read it as I rolled up. He did not lift his hand. His jaw was working, side to side, the way it does when he is holding down something large.

Behind him, his wife Lila was standing next to the pickup with a handkerchief. She did not use it. She just held it.

I went by at about fifteen miles an hour. Kirby took the thumper in both hands and rapped the wheel of his chair, three times, hard, on the rim.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

I had to look at the road for a while after that.

Kirby Nance hauled hogs and cattle for twenty-eight years, and he was good, and he was funny, and he fell off a trailer on a January morning in 2008 and crushed three vertebrae in his back.