The Eight Tires I Took Back

That was $4,600 even, and it came out of the very last of the savings. When I wrote the check, my hand shook a little.

Lyle saw it and put his hand on my shoulder and didn’t say anything, which was the right thing to say.

Now here is the part that matters. Every tire made for the road in this country has a code molded into the sidewall.

It starts with the letters for the Department of Transportation, then a plant code, a size code, and four numbers at the end for the week and year it was made.

I wrote down all eight of ours. Every character, in my spiral ledger, with the wheel position beside each one.

Left rear outside, left rear inside, and on around the truck, front drive axle and rear drive axle.

The man at the tire shop watched me do it and laughed. “Ma’am, you’re the first wife I’ve ever seen do that,” he said. I told him I was the bookkeeper, not just the wife, and he stopped laughing and held the flashlight for me.

Lyle teased me about it all the way home. “You going to read those to the tires at bedtime?” he said. I told him a ledger is just the truth written down where nobody can argue with it later.

I did not know then how right I was going to be.

His first load went out on a Monday, corn to a feedyard down by Ogallala. He came home Tuesday night grinning like a boy.

He said the truck pulled like a dream and he had not once had to look at another man’s name on the door.

There was something written on that page of tire codes that I did not see until that Saturday.

I’ll come back to it, because it is the part of this whole story that still gets me.

Lyle’s cousin is Royce Ostrander. Their fathers were brothers. Royce and Lyle grew up two miles apart, showed steers together at the county fair, and rode the same yellow bus to the same consolidated school for twelve years.

Royce runs a little livestock hauling outfit out of a gravel lot two miles down the county road from us.

Two trucks, two cattle pots, a metal shop building and a stack of old tires by the door that has been there as long as I can remember.

I will say this for Royce: he works hard. Fall is his season.

Every rancher in the hills is shipping calves in October and November, and a cattle hauler makes most of his year in about eight weeks.

But Royce had been struggling. Everybody knew it. Fuel went up, his insurance went up, one of his trucks threw a rod in the spring, and he had financed the repair on top of two truck payments he was already carrying.

At his mother’s on Labor Day, he had said, loud enough for the whole table to hear, that he was a month behind on both trucks and didn’t know how he was going to put rubber on them before the calves started moving.

His mother is Lyle’s aunt, and she hosts Thanksgiving every year for the whole family, twenty-some of us around two tables pushed together with a quilt over the seam.

Keep that in mind. It matters to what I did and what I didn’t do.

That Thursday, the first Thursday in November, I drove my mother, Glenna, to dialysis in North Platte.