The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

Inspection

Rhea ran the inspection table. She teaches fifth grade at the elementary and has run the town derby for the town for nine years.

She is a careful woman with a clipboard and a scale and a tape measure, and nothing gets by her.

She weighed the car with Beckett in it. A hundred and eighty-six pounds now, the old steel heavier than the mower parts.

Under the two hundred limit. She measured the length, the width and the wheelbase. She checked the brake.

The brake on Beckett’s car was a hinged oak lever on the right side.

You pull it back and a block of wood with a strip of old tire on it drags on the road. She pulled it three times. It held.

Then she got down and looked at the wheels for a long time.

“Beckett,” she said, “these aren’t the wheels you had Thursday.”

“No ma’am.”

“Where’d these come from, honey?”

The Truth

My son told her the truth. He did not leave anything out, and he did not dress anything up. I could not have stopped him if I had wanted to, and I did not want to.

He told her that his uncle Darrell helped him build the car all summer.

He told her that Uncle Darrell’s mower broke and he needed the axles back for his yards. He said it just like that, plain, like he was telling her the weather.

Then he told her that Mr. Lonnie went up in his rafters, and that these were the axles from 1958, and that the welder from church came, and that there was a name on the back axle, and the name was Mose.

Rhea looked over at Lonnie, who was standing by my truck with his hands in his back pockets, pretending to look at the sky.

“Lonnie Fite,” she said. “Are those your fifty-eight wheels?”

“They might be,” he said.

She looked at him a while longer. Then she wrote something on her clipboard, a lot more than she usually wrote, and she put a green sticker on the side of Beckett’s car. It was number fourteen.

The Hill

If you have never seen the Main Street derby in Sparta, it is not much, and it is everything.

The town closes off two blocks of Main on the Saturday before Labor Day. The hill runs down past the old bank and the hardware store and the courthouse square.

At the bottom, the volunteer fire department lays out a wall of square bales across the street, three high, to catch anybody whose brake does not hold. Every year somebody’s brake does not hold.

The people line both sidewalks. They bring lawn chairs and coolers and grandbabies.

The Methodist women sell sausage biscuits on the corner for a dollar and a half, and the high school band plays the national anthem, a little flat, at five minutes to ten.

There were twenty-two cars that morning, in three age groups. Beckett was in the oldest, ten to twelve. Seven cars. Two at a time, best two runs out of three, then the fastest times raced off.