The Old Ford in Mom’s Driveway

The Third Saturday

The third Saturday was the building day. It was the first Saturday of October and it had turned cool overnight, cool enough that we could see our breath at seven-thirty, but the sun came up clear and it was warm by ten.

Lowell had brought his own torque wrench. It was older than mine and he trusted it more than any new one. I did not argue.

The crankshaft went in first, on new bearings, the caps torqued a little at a time. Lowell turned it by hand, and it went around like it was floating. From Lowell, a nod is a parade.

Then the pistons. Beryl set the rings. Lowell tapped each piston down through the ring compressor with a hammer handle, and I guided the rods onto the crank from underneath. Six times, and six times it went right.

Mom sat with her small Bible in her lap that morning. Around eleven she started humming the hymn they sang at Dad’s funeral.

Lowell was standing at the stand torquing the last rod cap. I saw him stop, just for a second, with his hand on the wrench. Then he finished the turn and went on.

About noon, Trace drove by again. Slower than last time. He looked a long time. Then he went on.

“He’ll come,” Beryl said, without looking up.

“How do you know?” I said.

“Because he slowed down more this time than last time.”

After lunch we put on the new timing chain and gears, lining up the dots on the two gears the way the book says, and Lowell checked them twice, and then we put on the timing cover and the oil pump and the pan.

The head went on last. A new head gasket, head bolts torqued in three steps in the right pattern. Then the valve train, the lifters and pushrods and rocker arms, and the valve cover, and the intake manifold with its gaskets laid just so.

By four o’clock, it was an engine. A whole one. Clean and painted the dark Ford blue that Lowell had brought in a spray can from the co-op shop. Sitting on its stand in the driveway, in the long October light, under the maple that had gone half red.

Mom got up from her chair and walked over and put her hand flat on the valve cover, the way you would touch a horse.

“Well,” she said. “Look at you.”

The Fourth Saturday

Word got around. It always does out here. Somebody at the parts store told somebody at the elevator, and Junie told everybody else, and by the fourth Saturday half the county knew Erma Mossbarger’s old Ford was getting its engine back in that afternoon.

It was the second Saturday in October, bright and dry. Some of the men who came by had left their combines sitting in the field to do it.

The engine went back in that morning, slower than it came out. Lowell ran the hoist and I steered it down an inch at a time until it met the transmission.

Then all the small jobs again, the other way. The exhaust with new studs. The fuel lines. The wiring, every plug back where the masking tape said it went. The radiator and the hoses and the fan. The power steering pump. The throttle cable.

By noon there were six pickups parked along the county road in front of Mom’s. By one o’clock there were eleven. The men stood in the yard in a loose half circle with their hands in their pockets, the way men stand at a sale barn, not saying much.