The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

Across the Road

I pulled the rollback out of the lot at 12:31 with my son’s truck on the back and my daddy’s cap hanging straight in the window.

Cale rode in the cab beside me for the eighty yards across the highway, which was the shortest and longest ride of his life.

Harlan was standing on the loading dock of the feed store. He is seventy one, a big slow man in overalls who has owned the store for twenty six years.

He had been standing out on that dock the whole time. I found out later he had watched it all from there with a sack of layer pellets on his shoulder that he forgot to put down.

I pulled in by the dock and Cale got out.

“Son,” Harlan said. “What time is it?”

Cale looked at his phone. “12:34, sir.”

“You’ve got eleven minutes left on your lunch. Go eat something.” Harlan set down the sack of pellets at last. Then he pointed with his whole arm at the concrete apron right beside the dock, where nobody parks because that is where the farm trucks pull in to load.

“From tomorrow on, you park right there,” he said. “Inside my line. Nobody will ever lay a hook on it on my concrete. I’ll paint your name on the curb if I have to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I need somebody every Saturday from now through Christmas,” Harlan said. “Not every other one. Every one. Seven to two. Deer season, the whole county comes in for corn and salt. You want them?”

Cale stood there in his red T-shirt with his hands in his pockets and nodded about four times.

“Words, son.”

“Yes, sir. I want them.”

“Good,” Harlan said. “Now go eat.”

Cale went in through the side door. Harlan came down the dock steps and stood by my window.

He looked across the road at Lonnie’s lot, at the three drivers still standing by the fence, at the big man on the trailer steps who had not moved.

“Your daddy would have done it just like that,” Harlan said. “Not a word louder than it needed to be.”

Home

I took the Silverado home and set it down on the gravel by the pole barn at 1:05.

Then I went back to my desk and took four calls that afternoon.

Boyd pulled in at 3:50 in broad afternoon sun, the wrecker splashed with red mud to the doors.

He came straight to the Silverado, looked at the chains, looked at the strap I had put over the driveshaft, and nodded once.

“Good load,” he said. That is the most Boyd says about anybody’s work.

He rolled a creeper under the back end of the truck and had the driveshaft in by 4:10.

It slides into the transmission at the front and bolts to the rear yoke with two U straps and four bolts, and he torqued them down and checked them twice and then a third time because it was Cale’s.

At 5:15, still full daylight, Harlan’s grandson dropped Cale off at the end of our driveway.

Cale walked up and stood beside his truck and put his hand flat on the hood, the way you put your hand on a horse.

Boyd tossed him the keys. “Start it.”

It turned over on the first try. The 4.8 settled down into that low idle those old Chevys have, a little lope in it. Daddy’s cap swung once on the mirror and settled.

Cale sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and both hands on the wheel.

Then he put his head down on the wheel for a little while, and Boyd and I both found something to do over by the barn and let him.

Sunday

On Sunday we went to church like always, the three of us in the second pew on the left. The choir sang “Blessed Assurance,” which was my daddy’s favorite, and I held it together until the third verse, and then I did not.

After church we drove to Lonnie’s mother’s house for Sunday dinner, the little brick house on the edge of town where Lonnie and I grew up.

Her name was on the mailbox and Daddy’s name was still on it too, because she never would take it off.

She had set the table for six. Me, Boyd, Cale, herself, my aunt from Elkton, and one more plate at the end of the table where Lonnie used to sit. It had been set every Sunday since May.

Nobody sat in it that Sunday either. But she set it.