The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

The Initials

At a quarter to eight, the welder stopped and pushed his helmet up. He had his glove on the rear axle, right next to the bracket, and he was looking at something.

“Lonnie,” he said. “You want me to grind this off? It’s right where my bead goes.”

Lonnie came over and looked. Then he got down on his knee again, slow, and put his thumb on the steel.

Scratched into the axle, near the end, were four letters and two numbers. Somebody had done it with a nail, a long time ago, pressing hard. L.F. M.F. 58.

“That’s my brother Mose,” Lonnie said. “He was nine. He scratched that in with a sixteen-penny nail the night before the race, so the axle would know whose it was. Said it would make it go faster.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. The welder took his glove off.

“Mose has been gone eleven years this October,” Lonnie said. “He made me keep these up in the rafters. Every time I talked about cleaning out that garage, he’d say, don’t you dare, those are the fifty-eight axles.”

Beckett’s Thumb

Beckett crouched down beside the old man. He did not say anything.

He reached out and put his own thumb on the letters, right beside Lonnie’s, and ran it slowly across them the way you would touch something in church.

“Can I keep it on there?” he asked.

“You’d better,” said Lonnie. “That’s the fast part.”

The welder put his glove back on, moved his bracket half an inch inboard so the bead would clear the letters, and finished the weld without another word.

I saw him wipe his eye with the back of his wrist. He said it was the smoke.

I had to go inside for a minute and stand at the sink.

Eight Twenty Five

By eight-ten the wheels were on. Lonnie packed the hubs with fresh grease out of a can from his garage, and the welder checked every nut with a wrench and then checked them again.

Beckett got in and Lonnie pushed him down the driveway and back, slow, while the welder walked alongside watching the wheels for wobble.

They rolled true. They made a different sound than the mower wheels, a low steady hum, almost like singing.

I tried to give the welder my forty-one dollars. He looked at the bills in my hand like I had offered him a snake.

“Put that up, Haley,” he said. “I’ll see him on the hill.” Then he drove off, and that was the most I had ever heard him say.

We put the car in the back of my old pickup, Lonnie in the passenger seat and Beckett riding in the bed with his arm over the car, which I know is against the law and which I would do again.

We pulled up to the inspection table at the top of Main Street at eight-twenty-five, five minutes before they closed it.