The Clutch She Finished on the Gravel

“We’ll get it,” he said, which meant nothing.

They had brought a skid steer on the trailer. They chained each post to the bucket, tipped it, and laid it down on the trailer deck.

The overhead cables came down with it. The arms came off and went in a pile.

By ten thirty the trailer was strapped and they were gone. Curtis did not say goodbye.

He got in his truck and followed them down the highway toward town, and I stood in the doorway and looked at my floor.

Eight empty holes in the concrete, four on each side. A wide pink puddle of hydraulic fluid.

A rusted floor plate still lying across the middle of the bay where it had covered the hoses, because nobody had bothered to pull up the two screws holding it.

I want to answer the question I know some of you are asking, because I asked it myself that morning. Why did I not call the sheriff? Why did I not call a lawyer?

I did think about it. But I had done the books for sixteen years, and I knew what was on that paper.

Curtis’s name was on the note. A deputy would have stood in my doorway and called it a civil matter, and he would have been right.

A lawsuit would have cost more than the lift was worth. A man I knew in Houston who handles that kind of thing told me once that a simple property fight in the county runs three or four thousand dollars and most of a year.

I did not have the money, and I did not have the year.

I had a shop that had to stay open. That was the only thing I had left that was Dean’s and mine together, and I was not going to close it to fight about it.

So I put my coffee down on the bench, got the bag of oil dry from the corner, and started spreading it over that pink puddle with a push broom.

That was when I remembered Nadine’s truck.

It was sitting out on the gravel by the highway, where she had left it Friday afternoon.

A dark green 1995 Ford F-150, two-wheel drive, long bed, the 4.9 straight six and a five-speed manual. It had been her husband’s truck for twenty-nine years.

Nadine Ostby was sixty-four. Her husband had died two winters before, and she kept thirty head of mother cows on a place off a county road east of the highway, by herself, with that truck and an old Massey Ferguson tractor.

The clutch was slipping. Not a little. When she brought it in Friday, she said it would not pull her stock trailer up her own lane.

The engine would wind up and the truck would just sit there and smell hot.

She had eleven calves going to the sale barn in West Plains on Thursday. Her neighbor had offered to haul them, but she wanted to do it herself in her husband’s truck.

She told me that standing at my counter, with her purse held in both hands.

“I know it’s a lot,” she said. “Can you have it by Wednesday?”

“I’ll have it Wednesday,” I told her. I had a lift. I had done fifty clutches on that lift. It was an easy promise on a Friday.

Now it was Monday, and the lift was on a trailer headed into town.

I stood in the bay and did the arithmetic. Bay one was covered in hydraulic fluid and oil dry that needed a day to soak before I could sweep it, and I could not lie in that on a creeper.