Every Car In The Ditch Pulled Out Free

I did not say anything. I did not need to. I just nodded at him once.

Up on the road, Pius unfolded his arms. Thor put his cap back on straight. Annika touched the corner of her eye with her glove. Nobody clapped and nobody said a word. One by one, they got back in their trucks and drove home.

Merritt followed my wrecker the whole way back to my mother’s house, slow and careful, with his flashers on. Brielle rode with me. We stopped for her little blue car on the way, and she drove the last two miles home with both hands on the wheel.

The sun was just getting low over the lake when we pulled into my mother’s yard, a little after four. My mother was standing at the kitchen window, and when she saw the three of us pull in together, she put her hand over her mouth.

We ate supper together that night. Mom made her hot dish and a pan of bars, and we sat around the kitchen table, and for a long time nobody talked about the day at all.

Then Merritt put his fork down and told Brielle the whole story about his father. The cold. The four miles. The way his feet felt when he finally got home, and how his mother had cried at the stove, and how his dad had sat at the table and said nothing.

“I never told your grandma that part,” he said. “That my mother cried. I always told it like it was a good story. Like it was something to laugh about.”

My mother reached across the table and put her hand on top of his, and she left it there for the rest of supper.

The next morning at church, Merritt sat on the aisle, which he never does. When it came time to pass the peace, he shook Pius’s hand, and then Thor’s, and then he walked all the way to the back pew and hugged his granddaughter in front of everybody.

He did not say anything. He did not have to.

That Monday he drove to the farm store in town and bought a heavy yellow tow strap, thirty feet long and rated for twenty thousand pounds, plus a pair of good gloves and a grain scoop. He put them all behind the seat of his truck.

He showed them to me the next time I came over, the way a boy shows off a new bike. “In case I see somebody,” he said.

I have heard since, from about half the county, that he has pulled out a mail carrier, two high school kids, a man hauling a horse trailer, and the pastor’s wife. Every one of them tried to pay him.

He will not take a dime. He tells every one of them it is free on that road.

Brielle still drives that little blue car. She took the county road to school every day the rest of that winter, slow on the curves, and she never slid off again. But she keeps a tow strap in her trunk now, right next to the tow eye in its foam tray.

She asked me last spring if she could ride along in the wrecker on Saturdays this summer. I said yes. She is better on the cable than half the men I know.

My stepdad is sixty-seven, and he still drives that county road every day. He carries a tow strap behind his seat now, and he stops for everybody.