The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

What I believed

Annika brought him home in the fall of 2007.

She was twenty-four and teaching third grade in Marshall, and he was twenty-seven and worked at the body shop on the east edge of town, and he had a way of looking at a wrecked car that I later saw him use on everything, with his head tilted and his mouth shut, taking a long time.

Lars met him in the yard. Travis put out his hand and Lars held it about as long as a man holds a wrench he is deciding about.

“What do your people farm?” Lars asked.

“Nothing, sir,” Travis said. “My dad drove a delivery truck. Thirty-one years.”

“Huh,” said Lars.

It was not an unkind word. It was one syllable. But I saw Travis’s shoulders go the way a man’s do when he decides to expect less, and I did not say one thing to fix it.

They were married in 2008. Lars gave a toast exactly four sentences long, and one of them was about the weather.

For the next eighteen years I watched my husband and my daughter’s husband be polite to each other. At Thanksgiving Travis parked at the far end of the yard by the mailbox, as though he might need to leave in a hurry, and he left early every year because of a call from the shop. At Christmas he brought Lars a nice bottle of something. Lars did not drink. He thanked him and put it in the cupboard above the refrigerator, where it stayed.

Travis never came to help with harvest. I held that against him. Dean came up from Sioux Falls every October with his vacation days to run the grain cart.

What I did not know was that Travis had come once. In the fall of 2009, the second year they were married, he showed up in his work boots on a Saturday morning and offered to help move a gate.

“I’ve got it,” Lars said, and shut the gate himself.

He never offered again. A man told once, in that voice, that he is not needed does not need to be told twice. I found that out later. At the time I decided he just wasn’t a farm person and didn’t care to learn.

I said as much to Annika once, in my kitchen, drying a pan. “That man doesn’t know how to be in a family.”

Annika stood very still. “Mom, he knows more than you think,” she said, and she picked up her purse and left. I took her loyalty for the blindness of a woman in love.

By the time Lars died I had a settled picture of Travis Rutten, a good husband and father who put up with his wife’s family the way you put up with a relative’s dog.

I believed he had not cared for Lars at all.

The tarp, and the four hundred dollars

The tarp stayed behind the machine shed.

I went out there once, the second week of October. I’d gone to the shed for a ladder to clean the gutters, and a corner of the tarp had come loose in the wind and was snapping against a cinder block. I went to put it back. Instead I lifted the whole thing up, which Lars had done a hundred times with his flashlight, and I stood and looked.

It was worse than I remembered. Rust had come through the doors in lace patterns. The tires had gone flat. A mouse had made a nest on the dash out of a seed catalog. Under the mirror, the little wooden cross Annika made in Sunday school when she was seven hung on its bootlace, turning in the breeze.

I opened the driver’s door. Inside, the cab smelled like what he always smelled like, sun-warmed vinyl and gun oil and the Juicy Fruit he kept in the visor, and it was so strong I put my hand on the wheel and stood there. I did not sit in it. I did not cry. I was dry as a bone that fall, and that frightened me more than tears would have.

I put the tarp back.

Dean called that Sunday. My son is forty and sells crop insurance, and he does not know how to say he is worried about his mother, so he calls about practical things.

“Mom, have you thought about the truck? The scrap man in Marshall will give you four hundred dollars for it. I called. He’d come get it himself.”

“I’m not scrapping your father’s truck.”

“Then it can just sit,” I said.

I told Burl about it at the cafe on Wednesday, at my husband’s table. He turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer. “Lars told me last winter he’d have that truck running by his seventy-fifth birthday,” he said. “Said he had a plan.”

He never said what plan. Lars Quade carried things in his chest for months before he let them out, and some of them he never did.