The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

He looked down at the junkyard motor in my car. He looked at the valve covers for a long time.

I watched him read the number, and I watched him know whose red that was.

“Dad painted those?”

“Last week,” I said. “Out of the old can.”

“Fourth,” Trent said. “I heard.”

“Fourth out of eighteen.”

He nodded. He stood there a while. Then he said, “I’ll get the boat a real motor. A marine one. Used. I’ll save up for it.”

He looked at me. “Is your car going to need a garage?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“No,” Dad said. He stood up from the motor slowly, one hand on his knee. “The car stays here. There’s room in this barn. There’s always been room in this barn.”

He looked at both of us then, one and then the other, and I knew he was not only talking about the car.

“Trent,” he said, “you’ll take that motor to the shop in town tomorrow morning, and you’ll pay what they tell you to pay. And then you’ll come out here Saturday and help your brother check his valve lash, because you used to be good at it.”

Trent looked at him a long time. Then he nodded.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

He came out that Saturday. He came the Saturday after that, too.

He did not talk much, and neither did I, but he set the lash on the junkyard motor with Dad standing over him counting, and it was right the first time.

The machine shop tore down the built motor and found two stuck rings, a blown head gasket, and a cam that had started to go.

It came to seven hundred and eighty dollars to put it back right.

Trent paid every penny of it in cash, and he brought the receipt out to the barn and set it on the bench without a word.

By then I had made up my mind about something. I kept racing the junkyard motor.

It ran every week that whole summer, never once missed, and I finished in the top five six times with it. I would not have traded it for anything.

I sold the built motor in June to a young racer from up by Albert Lea who needed one for his own car.

I got fifty-eight hundred dollars for it, which was less than it cost me, and more than I ever thought I would see again the day I stood in my brother’s empty garage.

I put every dollar of it toward a down payment on a little garage of my own, a two-stall building on a lot behind the house I rent in town, with a concrete floor and a door that rolls up and a bench along the back wall.

Dad came over the day I got the keys. He walked all the way around the inside of it twice, looking at the walls and the wiring and the floor drain, and then he stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets.

“Good floor,” he said.

“Good floor.”

He reached into his jacket and handed me something wrapped in a red shop rag.

It was the old can of red enamel, with the label worn off and about a quarter inch of paint still sliding around in the bottom.

“For when you need it,” he said.

It sits on the top shelf over my bench now. I have never opened it. I figure I will know when I need it, the same as he did.