The Last Pull in Grandpa’s Ford

She called her sister and her sister’s husband. She called my brother in Sidney and his wife and their two girls. She called Dad’s sister, my Aunt Lois, who is eighty-one and hasn’t been to a fair since her husband passed. She called our pastor’s wife, who said she’d bring the pastor if she had to carry him.

By the time we got to the fairgrounds that evening, there were twenty-three of us. We filled the whole front row of the grandstand from one aisle to the other, and spilled over into the second row besides.

The county fair grandstand pull is the biggest night of the season. They run the tractors first, the hot farm stock and the super stocks, and then the trucks. The stands were full. You could smell the dust and diesel smoke and somebody frying elephant ears at the stand behind the bleachers.

The track had been worked and watered that afternoon, and the dirt was dark and packed. The sled sat at the far end, a big weight transfer sled with the pan on the front and the weight box riding up on the rails.

You hook your truck to the sled with a chain, and as you pull, the weight box rolls forward on the sled toward the pan, and the pan digs into the dirt harder and harder until it stops you. Whoever drags it the farthest wins. Drag it the whole three hundred feet and it’s a full pull, and then there’s a pull-off.

The pits were down past the end of the grandstand, a big dirt lot along the track full of trailers and trucks and tractors and people in folding chairs. Dad and Ty and I unloaded the Ford there late in the afternoon, and then we walked over to help Butch.

He was already there, unloading Hog Wild off the back of his trailer. He saw us coming and nodded.

“Brad,” he said.

“Butch.”

He looked at Ty, and then at my dad, and then at the Ford sitting there in the dirt with number 78 on the back glass.

“Cecil,” he said. “That the same truck?”

“Same truck,” Dad said.

Butch walked over and looked at it for a long time. He looked in the bed at our oak box full of scrap iron. He looked at the kill switch tether we’d wired to the steering column.

“Clean job,” he said. “That’s a clean job.”

And then he went back to his own truck and started pulling weights off the front of it, because he was going to drive it himself, and he couldn’t run the weight he usually ran with my son in the seat.

Ty helped him. He didn’t have to, but he did. The two of them unbolted the front weights without saying much, and Ty carried them to the trailer one at a time, sixty pounds each.

The stock class went at about seven o’clock, with the sun getting low in the west and the dust hanging gold over the track. There were eleven trucks in the class. Most of them were newer than ours. A couple were a lot newer.

Ty drew the seventh spot.

When the truck ahead of us was pulling, they let us roll the Ford up to the staging line. Ty sat in the cab with his black fire suit zipped all the way up and his helmet on and the tether clipped to his belt.

Dad walked behind the truck to the hitch.

The track crew are mostly volunteers, local men in orange vests, and one of them was Harold Pohl, who has been working the pulls at that fair since about 1985. He saw my father coming and put out his hand.