The Green Truck in the Driveway

He told Ethan about the ’66 Chevy he bought when he was 17, for three hundred dollars he earned walking beans for the neighbors at a dollar an hour.

He told him about rebuilding the carburetor on the kitchen table while my grandmother hollered at him about the smell.

“Your great-grandpa told me it was a pile of junk,” Dad said one night.

“Said I’d wasted my money. I drove that truck to my wedding, and I drove your grandma home from the hospital in it when your dad was born.”

Ethan stopped what he was doing and looked at him. “Really?”

“Really,” Dad said. “Nothing’s junk if somebody’s willing to put the time in. That goes for trucks, and it goes for people.” He sipped his coffee. “You can quote me.”

That Sunday, Ethan was with me, and we went to church like always. Afterward, we went to Dad’s for dinner, the way we do.

Dad said the blessing at his kitchen table the way he has my whole life, short and plain.

At the end of it he said, “And Lord, bless the boy’s truck, and the boy. Amen.” Ethan kept his eyes closed a second longer than everybody else, and when he opened them, he was trying hard not to grin.

The Body

By the third week we had the mechanical work done and it was time to start on the body.

That was the part I knew less about. I can weld, and I have patched plenty of grain truck boxes, but body work is its own trade.

So I called Reid, a man from my church who has done body work out of his home shop for thirty years.

He came out on a Saturday afternoon, looked at the cab corners, and laughed.

“Every one of these trucks,” Reid said. “Every one I ever saw. They hold water right there behind the door and rot from the inside out.” He tapped one.

“You can get patch panels at the parts store. Forty, fifty bucks a side.”

Reid showed Ethan how to cut past the bad metal into the good and tack the patch in with the wire welder a little at a time.

My boy flinched at his first arc. By evening he was laying neat tacks along the seam.

We did the rockers and the floor the next week. Reid came back and showed him how to skim the seams with filler and block sand until you could run your hand over them and feel nothing.