The Photo I Slid in His Card

The Phone Call From The Creek

He called me that Sunday afternoon. I heard the wind in the phone before I heard his voice.

A man knows, when he hears the wind first and the voice second, that the voice is going to be bad.

“Now Wade, don’t get excited,” he said.

That is how a man starts when there is plenty to get excited about.

He had taken the loader down the creek bank to reach a cottonwood that had come down across his fence line.

The ground was soft from a Thursday rain. He knew better. Every man raised on that ground knows better.

The downhill track lost its bite. The machine slid sideways. It rolled onto its left side into the cut and came to rest against the bank.

Merle was fine. He climbed out the top hatch like a man stepping out of a fishing boat, he told me, laughing a little.

The loader was not fine. The cab post was bent in over the seat. The left final drive was snapped clean off.

The hydraulic lines had torn loose and bled out into the mud. All that fluid, running down the bank into the creek.

“I’ll make it right,” he told me. “You got full coverage on it, don’t you?”

I said I did.

“Don’t you file a claim,” he said. “That’ll jack your rates for seven years. Let me handle it. I’ll get it fixed or I’ll pay you out. You have my word on it.”

A man’s word, in my family, used to be a thing you could set your full weight on.

So I did not file. I did not even raise my voice on the phone.

I said okay Merle, we will figure it out. Then I hung up and sat in my truck in the driveway for a long while.

I watched the sun go down behind the grain bins and did not go in for supper.