The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

The Feed Sack

Lonnie sat down on an upturned bucket and untied the twine. Inside the feed sack were two axles, solid steel, longer than the ones Darrell had taken.

Somebody had wiped them down with oil so many years ago that the oil had turned to a dark shine.

“Nineteen fifty-eight,” Lonnie said. “Main Street. I was twelve. I beat the Pruitt boy by half a car length and I have never let him forget it, and he has been dead since 1990.”

Beckett laughed. It was the first sound he had made since six-thirty.

“These sat on that car every summer till I outgrew it,” Lonnie said. “I took them off and put them up there in 1961. I figured I’d have a grandson someday.”

He never did have a grandson. His one daughter lives in Ohio and has two girls who are grown now. I did not say that. Neither did he.

Too Long

We carried everything back across the road and laid it out in the carport beside the blue car. Lonnie got down on one knee, which took a while, and set an axle across the bottom of the floorboard.

It was four inches too long on each side, and the old mounting holes did not line up with anything.

“Need brackets,” he said. “Welded. Can’t do it with bolts and baling wire, not on that hill. She’d throw a wheel at the bottom.”

I looked at the clock on my phone. It was seven-ten.

Lonnie stood up, slapped the dust off his knees, and pulled a flip phone out of his shirt pocket.

He made one phone call. He did not explain much. He said, “Bring your machine. Haley Brandle’s carport. It’s for the boy.”

The Welder

Twenty minutes later a man from our church pulled up in a flatbed with a portable welder bolted to the back.

He welds trailer hitches and cattle gates out on the highway, and he has built half the hay feeders in White County.

He is a big, quiet man in his sixties who sings bass in the choir and has never in my hearing said more than two sentences in a row.

He looked at the car, looked at the axles, and looked at Lonnie.

“These the fifty-eight axles?” he asked.

“They are,” said Lonnie.

The welder nodded once, like a man accepting a serious job. He went back to his flatbed and came back with a tape measure, a grinder, some flat stock and his helmet.

He measured twice. He cut four pieces of flat steel and drilled them on the bed of his flatbed. He fit them to the floorboard with lag bolts, then set the axles into them and tacked them in place.

Beckett stood behind him the whole time. The welder handed him a dark lens to hold up to his face so he could watch the arc without hurting his eyes, and showed him where to stand so the sparks would not reach his sneakers.