The Old Ford in Mom’s Driveway

The Week Between

Monday I took the block, the crank, the bad rod and the head to a one-man machine shop in the next county.

He said he could grind the crank ten thousandths under and it would clean up. The bores only needed a light hone and new rings.

“What’s it going in?” he asked.

“My mom’s pickup,” I said. “My dad’s, really.”

He wrote on his ticket and did not look up. “I’ll have it Friday.”

I ordered the rest that night. Bearings, a new rod, rings, gaskets, a new oil pump, and a new timing chain and gears.

With the machine work, it came to about thirteen hundred dollars. Not five thousand. I paid it out of the money I had been putting aside for new tires on my own truck, and I did not tell Mom what it cost.

Wednesday evening, while it was still light, my phone rang at the shop. It was my brother, Cletus, from Texas. I could hear the wind and a generator running behind him.

“Mom says you’re rebuilding the truck,” he said.

“I am.”

There was a long pause. “She told me Trace borrowed it.”

“He did.”

“She didn’t say anything else. She wouldn’t. But I know my boy.” Another pause. “Was he racing it?”

I could have told him everything. I almost did. Then I thought about Trace’s ears going red at the kitchen table, and I thought that it was not mine to tell. It was Trace’s.

“You ought to ask him,” I said.

My brother let out a long breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess I ought to.” And then, “Gaylene, let me send you money for the parts.”

“No,” I said. “Let him come help, if he wants to. That’d be worth more.”

The Second Saturday

The parts came Friday, and so did the machine work. Saturday morning Lowell, Beryl and Arvid were back at seven-thirty, and Mom was back in her lawn chair at eight with the thermos.

The second Saturday was the cleaning day. Rebuilding an engine is mostly cleaning. We washed every bolt and every oil passage in tubs of solvent until it was clean enough to eat off of.

About ten o’clock, a pickup slowed down on the county road. I looked up and knew it before I saw who was driving. It was Trace’s.

He did not turn in. He slowed down to nothing in front of the driveway and looked at us, the four of us at the washtubs and Mom in her lawn chair and the bare block shining wet in the sun. Then he drove on.

Nobody said anything. Beryl went back to his bolts.

Mom watched the pickup go all the way to the corner. Then she said, to nobody in particular, “He used to sit on his grandpa’s lap and steer that truck up and down this driveway.”

I had forgotten that. Dad used to let Trace steer when he was four and five years old, sitting on his lap, Dad working the pedals. Trace would honk the horn the whole length of the drive and Dad would let him.

I had to go in the house for a minute after she said that. I told them I was getting more rags.

After lunch Beryl measured the crank journals with a set of micrometers he had bought in 1971 and kept oiled for fifty years.

His hands shook getting them out of the box. But when he set the micrometer on the journal and turned the thimble down, his hands went still.

“Ten under, every one,” he said. “That machinist is good.”

“He is,” Lowell said. “I trained his daddy.”

By four o’clock everything was clean and measured and laid out in order on fresh cardboard in Mom’s garage, out of the weather, the bearings in their boxes and the pistons in a row like eggs in a carton.