The Junkyard Motor in Dad’s Barn

“He wanted you to yell at him,” Dad said, without turning around.

“I know it.”

“You did right.” He set a ring down on the rag. “Hand me that ring compressor.”

The fifth and sixth evenings went to the bottom end. Crank in, main caps torqued in three steps, everything checked with plastigauge before it went together for good.

New rod bearings. New rings filed to gap, every one of them, Dad standing over me with his glasses down his nose.

“Twenty thousandths on the top ring,” he said. “Not nineteen. Not twenty-one. Do it again.”

When I finished, Dad checked every single ring again behind me. “Good,” he said. That was all he said, and I went home with my chest about two sizes bigger.

The first Saturday we set the pistons. We had a new cam coming from the parts store, a mild one, inside the class rules, which say a hobby stock motor has to stay close to stock anyway.

Cam, lifters, timing chain and gears, oil pump, all new. All told it came to about six hundred dollars more than the motor itself.

Dad paid for the gasket set and the oil without asking me.

When I tried to give him the money, he put his hand flat over my hand and pushed it back toward my pocket.

The ninth and tenth evenings, we put on the heads and set the valves and put on the intake.

Dad had me torque the head bolts in the right order, in three passes, and he stood beside me counting each one under his breath like he was counting hymn verses.

On the eleventh evening we painted it. You paint a motor before the last of the bolt-on parts go back on.

I wanted to paint it black. Dad said no, a Chevy motor ought to be Chevy orange, the way it came from the factory.

“That’s how they came from Tonawanda,” he said. “That’s how I ran mine.”

So we taped it off and painted it orange, a good bright orange from a spray can, two coats out in the gravel in the late sun with the barn swallows going in and out over our heads.

It looked like a new motor when we were done. It did not look like it had ever been in a ditch.

That evening, after I thought we were finished, Dad sent me in the house for a pitcher of iced tea.

When I came back out he had the two valve covers sitting on a sheet of newspaper on the bench, already painted orange to match, and he was bent over them with a little brush in his hand.

He had a small can of red enamel open beside him. It was so old the label had worn off. I knew that can.

It had sat on the top shelf over his bench my entire life, and I had never once seen him open it.

“Dad?”

“Go sit down,” he said. “I’m not done.”

I sat down on the overturned bucket by the door and drank my tea and watched his back. It took him almost an hour.

His hand was shaking from the arthritis, and he would stop every few minutes and set the brush down across the can and rub his knuckles, then pick it back up.

When he finally stood up and stepped back, there was a red 17 painted on each valve cover. Not stenciled.

Painted by hand, with a little shadow along the edge of each number, the old-fashioned way sign painters used to do it.