The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

The Trophy

They gave out the trophies on the courthouse steps at eleven. Beckett’s was small, a gold plastic boy in a gold plastic car, on a marble-looking base. He held it like it was made of glass.

Rhea had them put the three top cars in a row on the sidewalk for the newspaper man to take a picture. The bullet car, the kitchen-cabinet car and Beckett’s blue car with its old spoked wheels.

Lonnie would not get in the picture. He said he had already had his in 1958 and once was plenty.

Beckett went and got him anyway, pulling on his suspender, and finally the old man stood behind the blue car with his hand on Beckett’s shoulder.

I have that picture on my refrigerator. I have it in my wallet. The bank has a copy now, too, on the wall right next to the old one of a skinny boy in a leather helmet.

Up the Hill

When it was all over, the street was still closed, and the cars had to be pushed back up to the top where everybody had parked their trucks and trailers.

Beckett got behind his blue car and leaned into it. It was heavy with the old steel axles, heavier than it had ever been, and the hill was steeper going up than it had looked going down. He made about ten feet.

Then Darrell came up beside him without a word. He put his hands on the back of the car next to Beckett’s, both of them leaning, the big hands and the small ones.

They pushed it up Main Street together in the sun, past the bank and the hardware store and Lonnie standing at the curb, the old wheels humming on the pavement, all the way to the top.

After

Darrell mowed Lonnie’s yard that Monday, front and back, with a borrowed mower.

He has mowed it every week since, all through that fall and the next spring and summer, and Lonnie has never once paid him, and Darrell has never once asked.

The new front axle for his mower came in on Thursday. That weekend Darrell went back out to the weeds beside his shop and pulled the wheels off two more old mowers, and he and Beckett started building a second car.

That one is not for Beckett. It is for next year’s eight-to-nine division, for a boy from our church whose daddy is overseas. Beckett is going to teach him the bowline.

The fifty-eight axles stayed on the blue car. Lonnie said they belong to it now.

They are under my carport, where Beckett checks them every morning before school, and every morning he puts his thumb on the letters on the back one.

L.F. M.F. 58.

He told me last week that he is going to scratch his own initials in, under theirs, the night before next year’s race. With a nail, the way Mose did. So the axle will know.

I told him to ask Mr. Lonnie first.

He already had.