The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

Mike and the battery

My husband, Mike, works at one of the feedyards outside town. He is not a talker. He fixes things.

When I told him what I’d done with our Christmas money, he didn’t say one word about carpet. He just said, “Does it run?”

“Gene says it does. Battery’s dead.”

“Well, let’s go see,” he said, and went and got his tools.

We spent that Saturday afternoon in Gene’s barnyard with the hood up and the wind blowing straw around our boots. Mike put a new battery in it and I held the light.

Then we pulled the front tires, because the tread was gone on both, and put on a used pair Mike had found at a tire place on Park Avenue for ninety dollars.

I can change a tire. Daddy made sure both his girls could. I drove a grain truck at harvest when I was fourteen, sitting on a feed sack so I could see over the wheel.

So I ran the lug wrench while Mike jacked it up, and Gene stood there with his hands in his coat pockets, telling us we were doing it wrong.

Mike changed the oil and checked the brakes. The pads were thin, so he did those too, two evenings later, in our driveway after work.

All in, with the title transfer and the tires and the battery and the pads, I was out about thirty-four hundred dollars. I didn’t care. I would have paid twice that.

Gene and I went to the tax office in Hereford together on the Monday and did the paperwork.

He signed the title over to me, and I paid the sales tax on three thousand dollars, and the lady behind the counter asked what I was going to do with a truck that old. I told her it was a Christmas present. She smiled like she knew.

The doctor

The truck was only half of it. I knew Tina had not been wrong about everything. Daddy had gotten light-headed on the road in October.

I was not going to put him behind the wheel of anything until somebody who knew more than me said he could.

So I went with him to his kidney doctor two days before Christmas. Dr. Hughes comes to the Hereford center twice a month from Amarillo.

He’s a tall, quiet man about my age, and he has always talked to Daddy and not over his head.

I asked him straight out whether my father could drive.

Dr. Hughes looked at Daddy’s chart, and then at Daddy. He asked about the time in October. Daddy told him the truth, which surprised me.

He said he’d stood up too fast out of the chair and gotten in the truck without eating, and he’d pulled over until it passed, maybe twenty minutes.

“That was smart,” the doctor said. “That’s what I’d want you to do.”

He said a lot of dialysis patients drive. He said it depends on the person, and how they feel after treatment, and their blood pressure.

He asked Pat, who was standing in the door, what she thought.

Pat said, “He’s one of my steadiest. If he eats before he leaves and his pressure’s good, I don’t see why not.”

So that was the deal, and the doctor wrote it in the chart. Daddy could drive himself if he felt well.

Pat would take his pressure after every treatment before he left the building, and if it was low he’d sit till it came up, and if it didn’t come up, he’d call me. He’d keep crackers in the truck. He’d never drive after dark.

Daddy agreed to every bit of it without a word of argument. I think he would have agreed to drive with a bushel basket on his head.