Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

Cal stopped chewing. “That’s all?”

“He said have the coffee on.”

Cal looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said what we were both thinking, because we didn’t want to be wrong.

Saturday came bright and cold.

I woke before the alarm. The sky outside the bedroom window was just going from gray to pale, and there was frost on the inside corners of the storm windows. I put on jeans and a gray hoodie and pulled my red flannel shirt on over it, and I put my hair up in a ponytail because I knew I’d be sweating by eight.

Downstairs I started the big percolator we’d borrowed from the church kitchen for Owen’s confirmation and never quite given back. I set out the last clean mugs. I could hear Cal upstairs waking the kids.

When the sun came up over the tree line along the creek, I picked up the first box, the one with the kitchen towels, and I pushed open the screen door with my hip.

And I stopped on the top step.

There were pickups on the lane.

They were parked nose to tail along the gravel, all the way from the yard back toward the blacktop, as far down as I could see. Every color a pickup comes in. Old ones with rust over the wheel wells and new ones with the dealer’s frame still on the plates. Two had flatbed trailers hitched behind.

Men were getting out of them. Men in work coats and caps, pulling on gloves, breath smoking in the cold. Dropping tailgates. Pulling moving blankets and ratchet straps and dollies out of the beds like they’d done it a hundred times, which, I suppose, most of them had.

I stood there with the box of towels in my arms and counted. I counted twice, because I didn’t trust the first number.

Nineteen.

Nineteen pickups on a Saturday at the end of October, in the middle of harvest, when every one of those men had someplace else he was supposed to be.

I knew every one of them. There was Loyd from the elevator, who’d given Cal the day off and then decided not to sit home for it. There was Ken Halverson, who had nine hundred acres west of town and beans still standing. There were the two Moeller brothers, who hadn’t spoken in three years over a fence line and came in the same truck.

There was old Virgil Schroeder, who was seventy-nine and had no business lifting anything, and who brought his grandson to do the lifting and stood in the yard telling him how.

Pastor Ray got out of a maroon Chevy that was older than Owen, pulled on a pair of leather gloves, and walked up to the porch steps.

“Morning, Tess,” he said. “Where’s the coffee?”

I couldn’t answer him. I just stood there.

“Here,” he said, and he took the box of towels out of my arms. “Which truck?”

Cal came out behind me then. He stood on the porch with his hand on the post, the one with Owen’s handprint of paint on it, and he looked down that lane at nineteen pickup trucks, and I watched my husband’s face do something I had seen it do only twice before, once when Owen was born and once when his dad died.

He didn’t say anything. He went down the steps and shook Ray’s hand, and then he shook Loyd’s, and then he went down the line, and every man he came to just shook his hand and nodded and kept pulling on his gloves.