The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

At twenty minutes to seven on Labor Day Saturday, my brother Darrell had my son’s soapbox car tipped over on its side in my carport, a socket wrench in his hand.

Beckett was standing beside him in his gray T-shirt and his red helmet. He had put the helmet on the second he woke up. I am fairly sure he had slept with it on the pillow next to him.

“I need them back, Haley,” Darrell said, not looking up at me. “The front axle on my riding mower sheared off yesterday afternoon. These came off the same model. I’ll make it up to him.”

I stood in the kitchen door in my socks with my coffee going cold in my hand.

The sun had just cleared the ridge behind the Baptist church, and the light came across the carport floor in a long gold stripe.

The car was blue. Beckett had picked the color himself, a can of porch-and-floor enamel from the hardware store on Main, and he had painted it three coats with a two-inch brush. You could still see the brush marks if you looked close.

Darrell had helped him build it. That was the part that made it hard to breathe.

Every Sunday afternoon since the end of May, after church and after dinner, the two of them had been out in Darrell’s shop behind his house on the Old Kentucky Road.

They cut the floorboard out of a sheet of three-quarter plywood. They built the sides out of pine one-by-sixes.

They made a steering bar out of a piece of oak and ran clothesline from it to the front axle, and Darrell showed him how to tie a bowline so it would hold.

The axles and the wheels had come off an old riding mower that had been sitting in the weeds beside Darrell’s shop for six years.

Darrell had pulled them off himself and cleaned the rust off with a wire brush, Beckett beside him holding the light.

Now he was taking them back.

The Rent

I should tell you why, because I have had a lot of time to think about it, and because my brother is not a bad man.

He is a tired one. There is a difference, though on that particular morning I could not have told you what it was.

Darrell fixes small engines for a living. Mowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, the odd go-cart.

He works out of the shop behind the little rented house on the Old Kentucky Road, and in the summer he mows yards on the side, because small-engine repair in Sparta does not pay the light bill.

He had three yards to mow that week that he had already been paid half on. Two of them were for older couples out on the Doyle highway who could not do it themselves anymore.

Those three jobs were his rent. I knew that, because he had told me so in July.

His own riding mower had sheared the front axle on a stump on Friday afternoon. The parts house in Cookeville said a week for a new one.

He had nothing else that would fit, except what was bolted under his nephew’s soapbox car.

So he came at twenty to seven, before the heat, and he took them.

“Darrell,” I said. That was all I said.

He stopped and looked at me then. His face was red and he would not hold my eyes.

“I know,” he said. “I know, Haley. I got no choice. I’ll get him set up for next year, I swear it.”