The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

On the last Saturday in April, my son-in-law stood in the gravel at the bottom of my porch steps, turned his cap around in both hands, and told me not to say anything yet.

“Not yet, Verlee,” Travis said. “Please. Walk down here and don’t say one word until you’ve been all the way around it.”

I had my dish towel in my fist and flour to my elbows, because Annika had called the night before to say they were coming out for breakfast and I had gotten up at five to make the rolls. My daughter stood in the yard with her arms folded tight across her chest, smiling in a way she was trying very hard not to. Her boy Isaac was studying his shoes.

And Travis Rutten, who in nineteen years had never once asked me for anything, held up one hand like a man at the front of a church asking the congregation to wait.

I waited.

I have thought a great deal since then about how I came to be standing there, and what I would have said if he had let me speak first. I think I would have said something gracious and wrong. So before I tell you what was in the yard behind him, I have to tell you about the tarp, and the man under it, and how badly I misjudged the man in front of me.

The truck

My husband Lars bought that Ford in the spring of 1979, one month before our wedding.

It was a 1977 F-250, two-tone, dark green on the bottom and cream on top, with a bench seat and a four-speed on the floor that took a man’s whole forearm to move. He paid $2,100 for it to a feed-store owner in Tracy who was retiring. The $2,100 was supposed to be for a suit. Lars looked at the suit in the window of the men’s store in Marshall, and he looked at the truck on the feed-store lot, and he came home with the truck.

He got married in his brother Arvid’s brown suit.

We left Bethany Lutheran that afternoon in the Ford. His brothers had soaped Just Married across the back glass and tied tin cans to the bumper, and the cans scraped all the way to the farm, ten miles of gravel, and Lars would not stop to take them off. He said the noise told the neighbors it was legal.

That truck carried both our babies home from the hospital. Annika came home in a March blizzard with Lars driving eleven miles an hour and me in the middle of the bench seat holding her inside my coat. Dean came home two years later in August with the windows down and the cab smelling like cut alfalfa.

It hauled seed corn and hogs and fence posts, and every December one scrubby cedar out of the shelterbelt that Lars swore was a fir. It had a heater that ran on one setting, which was hot, and a radio that picked up two stations, and a passenger door that did not open unless you leaned your shoulder into it at the right spot just below the window.

Lars knew exactly how to lean. He could do it from the driver’s side, reaching across, without looking. Strangers stood in the yard pulling on that handle like they were milking it.

It never started on the first try in its life. He would pump the pedal twice, say something to it under his breath, and it would catch on the second or third turn, and he would nod like it had finally agreed to a deal.

By the end you could watch the road go by through the bed floor. Then in 2018 the fuel pump gave out on a Tuesday, and he coasted it into the yard and parked it behind the machine shed and put a blue tarp over it, with cinder blocks on the corners.

“I’ll get to her this winter,” he said.

He said that for seven winters. Every fall he’d go back there with a flashlight and lift one corner of the tarp and look, and every spring he’d put the corner down again. I never asked him to hurry. I figured that Ford and my husband had an understanding that wasn’t mine to disturb.