The Eight Tires I Took Back

We did not have another $4,600. We did not have another $460. Every dollar we had saved was already on those wheels.

“Then I’ll go talk to him Monday when I’m back,” Lyle said. He had promised the neighbor two more days of corn hauling, Saturday and Sunday, and Lyle Ostrander does not break his word to a neighbor at harvest.

“Royce’s calves ship Monday,” I said. “First thing. Truck two is already lined up to haul a pot load to the sale barn. Those tires will be gone down the road by the time you’re home.”

Lyle rubbed his face with both hands. He knew I was right. He also knew I was going to say what I said next.

“Then I’ll go Saturday morning,” I said. “I’ll take your impact and the jack and the compressor. I’ll take the Kenworth over there and swap them back, wheel for wheel.”

I have had a Class A license since I was twenty. My dad needed a second grain truck driver at harvest, and I was the only one he had.

I can drive that Kenworth, and I have changed a truck tire before. Not eight of them, but I have done it.

Lyle looked at me a long time across the table.

“He’s going to be standing right there,” he said.

“I know it.”

“And his drivers.”

“I know it, Lyle.”

He got up and went out to the shop, and I heard him moving things around, and I thought maybe he was angry.

When he came back in, he had the impact gun and the 33mm socket in one hand and the long torque wrench in the other.

He set them on the table beside the ledger.

“Take my impact,” he said. “And the long wrench. Four seventy-five on every nut, star pattern, and don’t you skip it because you’re tired.” Then he said, “And don’t go alone, Darla.”

I didn’t answer that last part, and he knew what that meant too.

Saturday he left at six in the daycab for the neighbor’s bins. Before he went, he stood in the kitchen door in his coat and said, “Call me the minute you’re done.” I said I would.

I loaded the flatbed in the first light. Floor jack, the twenty-ton one. The gas compressor. The impact gun and the air hose. The torque wrench.

The wheel dolly Lyle built out of an old tire cart. Four wheel chocks. My work gloves. My ledger, in a gallon freezer bag so it wouldn’t get greasy.

Then I put the flatbed’s ramp up and chained the compressor down and looked at it all for a minute.

I am not ashamed to say I sat in the cab of that flatbed with my forehead on the steering wheel and said the Lord’s Prayer, the whole thing, slow.

I drove the Kenworth over first, bald tires and all, at fifteen miles an hour on the county road with the flashers going.

It was two miles. Then I walked back home and got the flatbed. That’s how much I didn’t want to ask anybody for help.

By eight o’clock I had the Kenworth parked alongside Royce’s truck two in his lot, about fifteen feet apart, both pointed at the shop. I chocked the steer tires on both trucks.

I set the jack under the rear drive axle of his Peterbilt, just inside the left rear hub, and pumped it until the duals cleared the gravel.