The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

Mom had been gone three years. Easter was one of the few days a year Dad still looked happy.

If I called the law on my brother that week, there would be no Easter, and maybe no more of them after that.

I would rather race than fight. That was the whole of my thinking.

So I pushed my car out of his garage by myself, rolled it up the ramps onto my open trailer, strapped it down, and threw my tools in the back of my pickup.

It took me an hour and a half. Trent never came back out.

I drove out to Dad’s place. He lives four miles north of Mason City on the gravel, in the farmhouse I grew up in, with a pole barn out back that he put up himself the year I was born.

He was in the barn when I pulled in, standing at the bench with the big door rolled open to let the April air in.

He had the radio on to the farm report and a lawn tractor carburetor in pieces on a rag in front of him.

He looked at the trailer. He looked at the empty engine bay with the hood still up.

Then he wiped his hands slowly on the red shop rag he always keeps in his back pocket.

“Well,” he said.

That is about how my father says most things. Gunnar Rasmussen spent thirty-eight years as a diesel mechanic at the implement dealer in town, working on combines and semis and grain trucks, and in all that time I do not think anybody ever heard him raise his voice.

I told him the whole thing standing in the barn door. He listened without a word.

When I got to the part about rent, his jaw moved a little, the way it does when he bites down on something.

“Four winters,” he said.

“Four winters.”

“And he never asked you for a nickel.”

“Not once. He told me to keep it there. He said he had the room and Vida didn’t care.”

Dad nodded. He picked up the phone off the bench, the old cordless one he keeps out there with the antenna taped on, and he called my brother right there in front of me.

I could only hear his side. He did not raise his voice. He never does.

“Trent. It’s Dad. I’ve got your brother here.” A pause.

“I know what you think he owes you. That motor belongs to him. I want you to take it out of that boat and put it back where you found it.”

There was a longer pause then. I could hear Trent’s voice coming through the little speaker, fast and high, but not the words.

“No,” Dad said. “No, that’s not how we do it in this family. You don’t take a man’s tools to settle a bill you never sent him.”

Another pause.

“All right,” Dad said. “Then that’s your answer. When you’re ready to bring it back, the barn door’s open. You know where it is.”

And he pressed the button and set the phone down on the bench.

He stood there a minute with his hands flat on the wood. He was sixty-four, and I saw it in his face more right then than I ever had.

My brother and I had both been trouble to him at one time or another, but we had never once been trouble to each other.

“He’s not bringing it back,” Dad said.

“I know.”