The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

I carried mail for thirty-one years on a rural route, a hundred and twelve miles of gravel and two of blacktop, six days a week. Rural carriers in our part of the country drive their own vehicles. Most of us drive something with the steering wheel on the right side, so we can reach the mailboxes without climbing across the seat.

In 2009 I bought a white Jeep Wrangler that another carrier had set up for right-hand drive. I paid six thousand dollars for it with a hundred and forty thousand miles already on it. I drove it on my route for ten more years.

When I retired, the Jeep had two hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and a dent in the back where a heifer had leaned on it in 2014. My husband said we ought to sell it. I said I would sooner sell him.

So the Jeep sat in our machine shed for four years, and I took it out for church and groceries, and it was waiting there that June like it had always known it would be needed again.

Wednesday morning I pulled into Garrett’s driveway at a quarter to eight. The sun was already up over the shelterbelt, and the meadowlarks were going in the ditch.

Silas came out on his crutches with his sports bag over his shoulder. He stopped at the bottom of the step and looked at the Jeep.

“We’re taking the mail Jeep?”

“We’re taking the mail Jeep,” I said. “You’re riding on the left side. It’ll be the first time in your life you’ve been the one in the driver’s seat without a license.”

He almost smiled. It was the first almost-smile I had seen out of him in two weeks.

Getting him into that Jeep was a job. I had pushed the left seat all the way back the night before, and my husband had put a folded moving blanket on the floor so Silas could rest his heel on something soft.

Silas handed me the crutches, sat down backward on the seat, and swung his good leg in, then lifted the bad one with both hands like it was a sack of feed. I laid the crutches in the back on top of an old mail tub.

Kayleen watched from the front window with her coffee. She did not come out. I waved anyway, because my mother raised me to wave.

The first week, Silas did not say ten words on the road.

He held onto the door handle on every curve. When I hit the washboard by the county line he closed his eyes. He wore his earbuds and stared out at the wheat, which was coming in green and even that year after a good spring.

I didn’t push him. I had spent thirty-one years alone in a Jeep. I know the difference between a quiet that wants company and a quiet that wants to be left alone.

The clinic in Ellendale is a small, low building on the edge of town, tan brick with a flat roof and a row of windows down the side. There is a little parking lot with eight spaces and one big cottonwood tree at the far corner.

The woman at the front desk was named Elsie. She was about my age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had been working that desk, she told me, since before they had computers.