The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

The bonus

The grain co-op pays a Christmas bonus when the year’s been good, and that year had been good.

We’d had a decent wheat crop and a big milo crop, and the manager handed out the checks the week before Christmas at the staff lunch.

Mine was three thousand dollars. I’m the office manager, and I’d been there eleven years, and that was the biggest bonus I’d ever gotten.

My husband Mike and I had talked about putting it on the credit card. We had talked about new carpet for the kids’ rooms.

I sat in my car in the co-op parking lot with the check on my steering wheel and looked at it a long time. Then I drove out to Gene Whitaker’s place.

Gene is eighty-one. He farmed two sections east of Daddy’s for fifty years and quit the year his wife passed.

He still has his old Chevy pickup parked behind the shop, and I knew he’d quit driving it because his eyes were going, and his son had told him to sell it before winter.

He was out in the barnyard throwing hay to a few old cows he keeps for company when I pulled in.

I got out and walked over to the fence in the cold, and I asked him what he wanted for that truck.

“That old white Chevy?” he said. “Lacey, what do you want with that thing?”

“It’s for Daddy.”

Gene put his pitchfork against the fence and looked at me a long time. He knew about the Silverado.

Everybody on our road knew. In a county this size, news about a man’s pickup travels faster than news about his health.

“It’s an ’85 Chevrolet half-ton,” he said. “Regular cab, long bed. Two hundred and twelve thousand miles, the odometer’s been around twice. The paint’s gone chalky and the heater fan only works on high. The battery is shot. I’d been asking thirty-five hundred for it.”

“I’ve got three thousand,” I said.

He looked at the truck behind his shop, sitting there with frost on the windshield, and then back at me. “That’ll do,” he said.

“Your daddy pulled my combine out of a mud hole in ’86 and wouldn’t take a dime. That’ll do just fine.”