The Last Pull in Grandpa’s Ford

He drove out with me in my pickup, and when we pulled into Dad’s lane, the Ford was parked out in front of the machine shed in the evening sun, washed and waxed, with the iron box in the bed and a number painted on the back window in white shoe polish. Number 78.

Ty got out of the pickup and stood there.

“What’s this?” he said.

Dad came out of the shed wiping his hands on a rag. “That,” he said, “is the stock class at the county fair, Saturday night. Your dad paid your entry. Seventy-five dollars. I’m told it’s nonrefundable.”

Ty looked at me. Then at Dad. Then at the truck.

“Butch is pulling Saturday,” he said slowly. “He’s counting on me.”

“I know he is,” I said. “The stock class runs before the modified trucks. You can drive both if you want to, and if Butch asks you, that’s up to you. I’m not going to tell you not to.”

That was true, and I meant it. I wasn’t trying to take anything from Butch. I only wanted my son to have one pull, at the end of that summer, where his name went over the speakers and his own grandpa’s truck was under him.

Ty walked over to the Ford. He ran his hand along the fender the same way Dad had, without knowing he was doing it.

“Dad pulled this truck in 1998,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He’d heard the story all his life.

“I took third,” I said.

“Grandpa stood at the hitch.”

“He did.”

Ty turned around and looked at his grandpa. Dad is not a tall man, and seventy-four years of farming have bent him a little, and his hands shake now when he holds a coffee cup. But he stood up as straight as he could right then.

“I can still stand at a hitch,” Dad said. “If they’ll have me.”

Ty didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he walked over and hugged his grandpa, the big kind, the kind where a boy almost lifts an old man off his feet.

“Yes sir,” he said into his grandpa’s shoulder. “Yes sir. They’ll have you.”

That night Ty called Butch himself. I didn’t ask him to and I didn’t listen in, but our house isn’t big, and I heard enough through the wall.

“I’m going to run my grandpa’s truck in the stock class,” Ty said. “So I won’t be able to drive for you Saturday. I’m sorry, Butch. I’ll help you load and unload, I’ll help in the pits, whatever you need.”

There was a long pause on the other end.

“No, it’s not about the money,” Ty said. Then he stopped. “Okay. It’s a little about the money. Mostly it’s about my grandpa.”

Another pause.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. See you Saturday.”

He came downstairs afterward and got a glass of milk out of the refrigerator and drank it standing up at the counter.

“What’d he say?” Tricia asked.

“He said he’d drive it himself.” Ty set the glass in the sink. “He said he’s too heavy for the class and he’ll have to pull half the weight off the front, and he’ll probably lose, and that’s fine, it’s his truck.”

“Was he mad?” I asked.

Ty thought about it. “No,” he said. “He sounded kind of quiet. Butch is never quiet.”

On Saturday morning, Labor Day weekend, Tricia started making calls of her own.