Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

On the floor beside him was a new board. Primed pine, the same width, already painted white to match. He’d bought it at the lumberyard on Wednesday, he told me later, and painted it in the machine shed on his lunch hour so it would be dry.

He nailed it up. Six finishing nails, set and puttied. He ran his thumb down the seam. You couldn’t tell anything had ever been different.

Then he stood up with the old board in his hands and turned it over.

The pencil marks were all there. Eleven years of them.

Owen, 3 yrs, at the very bottom, in Cal’s handwriting. Then Owen 4, and Owen 5, and on up. Maisie starting low on the other side, the year she was born. Jo below her, in my handwriting, from the year we came home from the hospital. Every September on the first day of school, every kid, backed up against that doorframe with a book flat on their head.

The last line for Owen was from that September. He’d grown four inches in a year. He was almost as tall as his dad.

Cal didn’t say anything. He walked out of the pantry and through the empty kitchen and out onto the porch, and Owen was coming back up the steps for the last load, and Cal held out the board.

Owen stopped on the second step. He looked at it. He looked at all those lines, going up and up, his whole life in pencil on a strip of painted pine.

“Your mom wanted to keep it,” Cal said. “So did I. I figured you’d be the one to carry it.”

Owen took it in both hands. He didn’t say anything either. He’s like his dad that way.

He held that board flat against his chest like it might break, and he walked it down the steps and across the yard to Cal’s truck and laid it in the back seat, and then he stood with his back to all of us for a minute with his hand on the door.

Maisie saw. She went and stood beside him. She didn’t say anything, she just stood there, and after a while he put his hand on top of her head the way you’d put a hand on a fence post, and they stood like that.

I had to sit down on the porch steps. Virgil Schroeder came over on his cane and sat down next to me without asking, which took him about a minute, and he didn’t say a word. He just sat there. When I was done, he patted my knee twice and used my shoulder to get back up.

By eleven thirty it was all loaded.

Nineteen pickups and two trailers, and every one of them had something of ours in it. The men were throwing ratchet straps over the last loads, and somebody had found the canning jars and Christmas ornaments in the cellar.

That was when Leland’s truck came up the lane.

I saw it from the porch. It came slow, because the lane was lined on both sides with pickups and there was barely room to pass. It came past one truck, and then the next, and then the next, and I could see Leland’s face through the windshield, and I watched it change as he went by each one.

He knew those trucks. Everybody in our county knows everybody’s truck. He’d have known Ken’s and Loyd’s and the Moeller brothers’ and Pastor Ray’s old maroon Chevy before he could see who was driving them. He had sold half of those men their first tractor.