The Trailer I Backed Through the Cones

The First Load

A man named Virgil Tuck ran a little grain-hauling outfit out of our county, three trucks and himself, mostly local work, corn and beans out of the farms to the river terminal at Glasgow in the fall and whatever came along the rest of the year.

Donna knew him, because Donna knows everybody, and she made a call before I was even off the lot, and Virgil told me to come see him Thursday. I went Thursday. He looked at my license and my clean record and asked me two questions about my kids and whether I could be loaded by six, and he put me to work Monday.

My first week I hauled corn. Out to the field in the dark, sit in the line behind the combine, get my hopper filled off the auger wagon, tarp it, run it the thirty-odd miles to the river, dump in the grate, weigh out, do it again. In the fall during harvest you run until the farmer quits, and the farmer does not quit while the weather holds, so I ran long.

It is hard work and the hours are ugly and I was bone tired in a way I had not known a body could be tired. But every load I dumped at that terminal was money that was mine, that nobody had promised me and then taken back, that did not depend on a man in Arkansas or a mother who orbited my sister.

My first check, for that first short week, was nine hundred and some dollars. I had not held a check like that in my life. I sat in the cab in the terminal lot and I looked at it a long time.

I want to tell you I was sensible with it, and mostly I was, the lion’s share went where money has to go when you are a single mother behind on things. But I drove to the truck stop on the way home and I bought three trucker caps off the rack, the real kind, mesh backs, one green and one red and one blue, and I had the girl behind the counter run them under a label gun that printed little names, and I had her stitch on each of their names, Cody and Hannah and Sam.

I gave them out at supper. You would have thought I had handed them the moon. Hannah slept in hers. Sam will not take his off to this day, it is filthy, I have to wash it while he is asleep and have it back by his plate before he wakes or there is a national emergency.

Cody turned his over and looked inside it where it was stitched and said, “Did you buy these with truck money?” and I said I did, and he put it on and pulled the bill down low the way the men do at the co-op, and he said, “I’m gonna haul grain too someday,” and I said, “You are going to do any blessed thing you want to, bud, that is the whole point of all of this.”