The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

Third

He crossed the line third.

Not first. The bullet car from Smithville beat him by most of a second, and the big girl from Doyle beat him by a little less.

I want to be honest about that, because people who tell this story around town sometimes make it first, and it was not.

He pulled the brake and that strip of tire squealed, and he rolled to a stop about ten feet short of the bales.

Then he pushed his helmet up and looked back up the hill for Lonnie and waved with both arms.

And that was when I saw Darrell.

He was standing at the end of the hay bales on the right side, by the fire truck.

He still had grass on his jeans up to the knee. He must have finished his first yard and driven straight into town.

I do not know how long he had been there. Long enough to see the car come down the hill. Long enough, I think, to see what was on it.

The Announcer

Rhea had gone up into the little announcer’s stand on the courthouse lawn, the one the fire department builds every year out of two-by-fours and plywood, to read the times. She had her clipboard in one hand.

She leaned to the microphone.

“Folks,” she said, “before we post the final times, I want to tell you about the wheels on the blue car, number fourteen, because I don’t think I’ll get another chance to tell a story like this one.”

The whole street got quiet. You could hear the band kids shuffling their music.

What Rhea Said

She told them. She did it plainly, the way a schoolteacher tells a thing, with no meanness in it.

I have thought since that she must have worked out the words while she was standing at the top of the hill.

She said that Beckett Brandle built his car this summer with his uncle, and that this morning his uncle needed the axles back to make a living, because a man has to work.

Then she said that Mr. Lonnie Fite, who won this race on this hill in 1958, climbed up into his garage rafters at seven o’clock this morning at eighty years old and brought down his own wheels.

She said the axle on that car had two sets of initials scratched in it, L.F. and M.F., and that M.F. was Mose Fite, who a lot of people on this street remember, and who scratched those letters in with a nail sixty-some years ago so the axle would know whose it was.

“So the axle knew,” Rhea said. “Third place, ten to twelve division, Beckett Brandle, on the fifty-eight wheels.”

The Street

I do not know what I expected. I think I expected applause, and there was some.

But mostly it was something else, something quieter. People turned and looked up the hill at Lonnie, standing at the curb in his suspenders.

And then a few of them turned and looked at Darrell.

Not mean. Nobody said a thing to him. A couple of men he mows for looked at him and then looked at the ground.

A woman from our church put her hand on his arm for a second as she walked past, and kept walking.

My brother stood at the hay bales and took it. He did not leave. I will give him that for the rest of my life.

He could have got in his truck and gone back to his second yard, and nobody would have stopped him. He stood there.