The Old Ford in Mom’s Driveway

Some of them were the coffee crowd from the elevator. Some were farmers I had worked on combines for. One was the machinist from the next county, with his son, who had driven forty minutes to hear his crankshaft run.

Junie came out from the elevator on her lunch hour with a sheet cake in a pan, and set it on the hood of her car, and cut squares of it for everybody on paper napkins.

We filled the oil and coolant. Then I spun the oil pump with a priming tool on my drill until oil came up out of every rocker arm.

Lowell watched every rocker. “That’s good,” he said quietly, when the last one wet. “That’s good oil.”

I put the distributor back in where we had marked it, with number one at the top. I lowered the hood and Beryl and Lowell eased it shut. I connected the battery last.

And then, a little after two o’clock in the afternoon, I leaned into the engine bay in my blue coveralls with a navy bandana tied over my hair, and I snugged the last bolt on the air cleaner, and there was nothing left to do but turn the key.

That was when I heard a pickup turn in off the road behind me.

I knew the sound of it. I straightened up and turned around.

Trace parked at the very end of the drive, behind all the others, and he got out and shut the door, and he stood there at the edge of the gravel with his hands at his sides.

Every man in that yard knew who he was. Every one of them knew whose truck this was and whose fault the knock had been, because out here, you always know. And nobody said a word to him. Nobody turned their back on him either. They just made a little space.

He stood there. He did not come closer, and he did not leave.

Mom got up out of her lawn chair. She brushed the cake crumbs off her cardigan.

Lowell walked over to her and held out the keys. Dad’s keys, on the same ring Dad always carried, with the little brass tag from the elevator on it.

“Erma,” Lowell said. “I believe it’s your turn.”

She took them. She walked to the red and white Ford, slow, the way she walks now, and Beryl opened the door for her, and she climbed up and in and pulled the door shut.

Trace took one step closer.

Mom put the key in and looked at me through the windshield. I nodded.

She turned it.

It caught on the second turn. It caught and it ran, rough for just a second while the fuel came up and the lifters pumped up, and then it settled down to an idle, low and smooth and even as a heartbeat.

There was no knock. There was nothing but that engine running, and the sound of eleven men breathing out at once.

Beryl took his cap off. The machinist’s son whooped once, and his father put a hand on his shoulder, and he stopped. Lowell stood with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, just listening to it.

I stood by the fender with a rag in my hand and listened too. I listened for anything wrong. There was nothing wrong.

Mom sat behind the wheel with both hands on it, and she let it idle for a while. Then she put it in reverse, slow, and backed it out from under the maple, and turned it around in the yard.