The announcer had just read off the distance, 312 feet and a full pull, and the crowd in the grandstand was still clapping when my wife’s cousin reached up and took the microphone right out of Gene’s hand.
Butch Lammers is a big man, fifty years old, with a gray beard down to his collar and a laugh you can hear over a blown big block. He held that mic like it was his, and in a way that whole summer he acted like everything was his.
“Let’s hear it for the truck, folks,” he said. “Eleven hundred horses and not one of them asked for a raise. And give a little something for the hired help.”
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He pointed at my son. Ty was still sitting in the cab of that tall lifted pulling truck with his helmet on, his hands on the wheel, waiting for the tractor to tow the sled back. He was sixteen years old and he had just won his class for the sixth time that summer.
The crowd laughed. It was the easy kind of laugh people give a big man with a microphone, the kind that doesn’t mean anything. Most of them didn’t know who Ty was. Most of them didn’t care.
I was standing at the fence by the pits with a paper cup of lemonade going warm in my hand, and I watched my boy take off his helmet. He didn’t look at the grandstand. He looked at his gloves, and he picked at a seam on one of them, and he waited for it to be over.
That was the moment. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since, and that was the moment I knew it had to end. Not the money. The way my son looked at his gloves.
My name is Brad Ketchum. I’m forty-four, and I run the scale at the grain elevator in our little town in west-central Ohio, where the elevator is the tallest thing you can see for about twenty miles in any direction.
My wife, Tricia, is the school nurse at the consolidated school. She’s forty-three. She’s the kind of woman who keeps a box of granola bars in her desk drawer for the kids who come in with a stomachache that is really just an empty stomach, and she never once asks them about it.
Our son, Ty, was a junior that fall. He’s been driving farm trucks since he was twelve, the way most boys out here do, hauling wagons from the field to the bin with his grandpa riding along to make sure he didn’t take the corner by the ditch too fast.
Butch is Tricia’s first cousin. Their mothers were sisters. He farms about three hundred acres and runs a hog operation, a finishing barn with a couple thousand head, on the home place his dad left him a few miles north of us.
And for as long as I’ve known him, Butch has campaigned a modified pulling truck. It started as a Chevy and there isn’t much Chevy left in it now. It sits up tall on big pulling tires, it has a supercharger sticking up through the hood, and it is loud enough to rattle the windows in the fair office.
Butch called it Hog Wild. He had the name painted down both sides. Every Saturday from early summer to Labor Day, it went somewhere on a trailer behind his diesel, to a fair or a festival or a volunteer fire department pull in one of four counties.