The Clutch She Finished on the Gravel

“Please.”

“I’ll be there at seven,” he said. “Before my shift.”

Before I went to bed, I said my prayers the way my mother taught me, on my knees beside the bed.

I did not ask for anything about Curtis. I asked to have the strength in my back to get that transmission up.

Toby’s truck pulled onto the gravel at five till seven on Tuesday morning. It was cold and bright, and there was frost on the hood of the Ford and on the grass along the highway ditch.

He brought a box under each arm and a sack of sausage biscuits from the station in town. He set it all on the tailgate of his truck and looked at the green Ford sitting up on the stands.

“You’re doing it out here,” he said.

“I’m doing it out here,” I said. “Help me get it down, then go to work.”

The kit was a good one, a name brand in a red box. It cost me $238 at Toby’s counter, plus $64 for the slave cylinder. I paid him out of the shop checkbook that I had finally opened.

I drained the transmission oil into the pan. Then I took the plastic disconnect tool Toby brought and released the hydraulic line from the slave cylinder fitting at the side of the bellhousing.

On those trucks, the slave cylinder bolts to the side of the bellhousing and pushes the clutch fork.

You could swap it with the transmission still in, but a worn one fails soon after a new clutch. A man who skips it may do the whole job twice.

Toby rolled the transmission jack under. It was a small one, a floor model with a saddle and a chain, not the tall kind that goes with a lift. Dean bought it secondhand for exactly this kind of day.

I set the jack under the transmission pan and pumped it up until it just took the weight. Then I unbolted the rear mount from the crossmember and pulled the crossmember out.

The bellhousing bolts came next. On the M5OD, the bellhousing is cast as part of the case, and it bolts straight to the back of the engine block.

Some of those bolts are easy. The top two you reach by feel, with three extensions and a swivel, lying flat with your arm up past your elbow in the dark.

When the last bolt was out, I put one hand on the transmission and one on the jack handle.

“Ready,” I said.

Toby lay on the plywood on the other side, one hand on the tail housing.

I worked it straight back, slow, rocking it a little, until the input shaft slid out of the clutch disc. Then I let the jack down an inch at a time.

That transmission weighs better than a hundred pounds dry. When you work on a lift, you lower it at chest height, standing up.

When you work on the ground, it comes down a foot over your face, and you think about that the whole way.

It came down clean. Toby rolled the jack out from under the truck and onto the gravel, and we both lay there a second on our backs and breathed.

“Dean would have cussed at least once,” Toby said.

“Dean would have cussed six times,” I said, and it was the first time I had laughed since the funeral.

He had to be at the store by eight. He stood up and brushed the gravel off his jeans and looked at me lying there, and I could see he did not want to leave.