The Last Pull in Grandpa’s Ford

He paid for it with money he’d saved from three years of working nights at the plant and farming days. He’s told me the number a hundred times. He still has the window sticker in a folder in his desk drawer.

And in 1998, at the county fair, Dad let me take it in the stock class when I was sixteen years old.

I didn’t win. I took third. But I’ll never forget it, because Dad stood at the hitch the whole time. You can’t have a passenger in a pulling truck, so he stood back there by the sled chain where he could see me in the mirror. When the flagman dropped the green, Dad slapped the tailgate twice, and I let the clutch out.

I’ve thought about those two slaps on the tailgate every Labor Day since.

The next morning I drove out to Dad’s place before work. He was in the machine shed, the way he usually is at six in the morning, with a cup of coffee on the workbench and the radio playing the farm markets.

The Ford was parked where it always is, in the back corner, two-tone brown and cream with the paint gone soft on the hood from nearly fifty years of sun. I told him the whole thing. The purses, the waiver, the mic, the way Ty looked at his gloves.

Dad didn’t say anything for a while. He drank his coffee and looked at the Ford.

“Forty-two hundred dollars,” he said finally.

“About that.”

“And the boy never said a word.”

“He asked me not to make a thing about it.”

Dad set his cup down. “Then don’t make a thing about it,” he said. “Just let him drive.”

He walked over to the Ford and put his hand flat on the fender the way you’d put your hand on a horse.

“She’ll need plugs,” he said. “And wires. And I’ve been meaning to rebuild that carburetor since about the Clinton administration.”

We had two weeks.

I didn’t tell Ty right away. I wanted Dad and me to get the truck right first. We spent every evening that week in the machine shed after supper, with the big door rolled open and the bugs coming in to the shop lights.

Dad rebuilt the Motorcraft two-barrel on the workbench, laying every piece out on a clean shop rag in the order it came off. I did the plugs and wires. We changed the oil and the transmission fluid and checked the U-joints and greased everything that would take grease.

We went through the stock class rules line by line. Highway-rated street tires, which the Ford already had. Stock hitch at the height the rules called for. A kill switch on a tether, which we had to wire in. Seat belt, which it had, and a helmet, which Ty had.

The class weighed in at sixty-two hundred pounds with the driver. The Ford weighed a little under five thousand empty. We built a box in the bed out of oak boards and filled it with scrap iron off Dad’s pile until the elevator scale said we were right.

On the Thursday before the fair, I came home from work and found Ty in the kitchen eating cereal at four in the afternoon, which is something sixteen-year-old boys do.

“Get your boots on,” I said. “Grandpa wants you at the shed.”