The Beet Truck in the Grove

He hauled grain in it, and then, when the sugar company opened the piling ground east of us, he hauled beets in it for twenty-some falls.

It had been parked in the box elders behind the old granary since the year he died, and that was 2009.

My dad never had the heart to sell it. Brent always said we should, for scrap. I never let him.

Arvid and I walked out to it through the leaves. The green paint had faded to the color of an old pea pod and gone chalky on the hood.

There was a wasp nest in the mirror bracket. The two outside rear tires were flat to the rims and checked all over with cracks.

“She’ll run,” Arvid said, before I had even asked. He put his hand flat on the fender the way you would on a horse.

“Your grandpa never let anything go on this truck. Mice’ll be in the air cleaner. That’s all.”

Ingrid’s bus dropped her at the end of the drive at ten after four. She came out to the grove still carrying her backpack.

She knew already. In a town our size, a thing like that is all over the school before the last bell.

“Mom,” she said. “Shayla took the truck?”

“She did.”

She looked at the old Ford for a long minute. Ingrid is tall like her father, and when she is thinking she pushes her hair behind both ears at once.

“Then let’s get this one going,” she said, and set her backpack on the granary step.

We worked on it until the light went. Arvid pulled the air cleaner and threw out two handfuls of mouse nest and chewed seed corn.

Ingrid ran to the shop for a can of fresh gas, a jug of hydraulic oil, and the battery charger.

I drained the old gas out of the tank into a bucket, because seventeen-year-old gas in a carburetor is worse than none.

The battery was dead past saving, so the next morning before seven I drove to the farm store in Crookston and bought a new group thirty-one for a hundred and eighty-nine dollars.

At the co-op tire shop, a young man I did not know found me two used ten-hundred twenties off a wrecked grain truck. A hundred and forty dollars apiece, mounted.

By ten o’clock the battery was in, the tires were on, the tank had forty gallons of fresh gas, and Arvid had poured a capful of gas down the throat of the carburetor.

I climbed up into the cab. The seat smelled like dust and old vinyl and, very faintly, like Grandpa’s pipe.

I turned the key. The starter groaned and turned it over slow, then faster, and the old engine caught, coughed out a cloud of blue smoke that hung in the box elders, and settled into a rough, steady idle. Arvid nodded once.

I pulled the hoist lever and the box rose, slow and shaking, and came back down.

“No leaks I can see,” Arvid said. “Don’t go over forty. And go easy on that two-speed until it warms up.”

A beet harvester does not hold much. Arvid’s six-row lifter carries a small tank, and when it fills, the boom has to unload into a truck running alongside.

With two trucks, a harvester never stops. With one truck, it waits.

The tandem had hauled about twenty tons a load. The old Ford, with Grandpa’s plank sideboards still bolted on, would haul nine and a half if I heaped it and took the county road slow.