The Ford My Son and I Rebuilt

The Lot Off Highway Ten

There was an old man named Earl Dawes out past Kinta who kept dead vehicles in a pasture the way other men keep dogs, and I had seen his Ford a hundred times from the road.

A 1972 F-100, long bed, the Ford blue gone to chalk and the fenders eaten through to lace, sitting up on its rims in the johnsongrass with a cedar growing up through where the tailgate used to be.

I had a thousand and some in the truck and three thousand in my coat and a boy in the passenger seat who had not said two words since we left the drive.

Earl came out on his porch in his sock feet and a Carhartt. “That old Ford,” he said, when I pointed. “Boys, that thing ain’t run since Clinton was in. Motor might be stuck.”

“We’ll see about the motor,” I said. “What do you want for it.”

He rubbed his chin and looked at Levi and looked at me, and he is a sharp old man and he saw something in the two of us standing there at dark-thirty in November.

“Fifteen hundred and I’ll deliver it on my flatbed,” he said. “But I tell you what. You that boy’s daddy?”

“I am.”

“Twelve hundred, then, and I’ll throw in a parts truck I got the bed off of, if you’ll haul it. A boy ought to have a project with his daddy. I did with mine.”

I counted him out twelve hundred from the envelope, and I will tell you it was the first thing all day that did not feel like a loss.

Levi walked around that Ford in the dark with his phone light, and I watched him do it. He crouched down and looked up under the fender at the rust and he put his hand flat on the hood the way you do with a horse you are getting to know.

“Dad,” he said, “the floor’s rusted out. You can see the ground.”

“I know it.”

“How are we gonna fix all this?”

“Same way you eat an elephant,” I said. “One bite. We done it before.”

He did not know yet that we were doing it in the very bay the Camaro left that morning. He would figure that out when Earl’s flatbed backed up to my barn an hour later, and I was not going to tell him ahead of time. Some things a boy should get to see for himself.

Earl followed us home with the Ford chained down and his headlights bouncing in my mirror the whole way up the county road, and I thought about how that same road had carried Chad’s diesel off a few hours back, and how it had just carried an old man and a rusted Ford to my gate, and how a road does not care which way a thing is going. It just lays there and lets you come or go.