The Skidder on the County Road

Wilbur

Opal didn’t leave. I told her she could go home. She’d been standing in the road for two hours, and she’s sixty-nine. But she just shook her head and kept her flag rolled under her arm.

“Somebody ought to be standing here when he comes,” she said.

So we waited. Me on the skidder. Marjean in her car with the window down. Opal on the shoulder with her red bucket.

At twelve thirty, the wrecker came around the bend. It was the big one, the heavy rotator with Pagel Towing on the door in gold letters.

Wilbur came slow, the way you come when you know there’s a job waiting and you mean to make the man in the ditch sweat a little longer. He had his window down and his arm out.

He pulled up beside the ditch and stopped. I watched him look at it. The torn-up clay. The ruts going up the bank.

The long scrape in the gravel where the trailer had come out. Then the skidder, sitting there on the shoulder in the sun with the cable wound back on the drum.

Then me. He sat in the cab a long time. I didn’t wave. I didn’t smile. I just sat there and looked back at him.

Finally he opened the door and climbed down. He started across the road toward me, slow, with his hands at his sides.

Opal shifted her red bucket to her other hand and walked over to meet him.

She met him in the middle of the road. She’s maybe five foot two. Wilbur’s well over six feet. She stood right in front of him with her flag and looked straight up at him.

“Afternoon, Wilbur,” she said. “Opal.” He tried to look past her at me. “Where’s the truck?”

“At the mill,” she said. “Crossed the scale twenty minutes ago. Tilda winched it out with the skidder at quarter to twelve. Three pulls. I stood on this shoulder and watched every one.”

Wilbur looked at the ditch again. His jaw worked. “That’s a fool thing to do,” he said. “She could’ve rolled it. Could’ve got somebody killed.”

“Well,” Opal said. “If somebody with a wrecker had come when he was called, she wouldn’t have had to.”

He didn’t say anything to that. Opal wasn’t done. She didn’t raise her voice. She never does. She just said it the way you’d read a list at a church meeting.

“I heard what you said to that boy on the phone, Wilbur. The whole road heard about it before ten o’clock. Thirty-five hundred dollars cash, and you’d come when you came, and his daddy was always in a hurry too.”

Wilbur’s face went red from the collar up. “I’ve known you since you were nineteen years old with grease to your elbows,” Opal said. “I knew Thurman.

I stood up at his funeral. And I’ll tell you what I’d have told him. That boy has never done one thing to you but be born to the wrong man.”

Marjean Gets Out

That was when Marjean got out of her car. Wilbur hadn’t seen her there. I watched him see her. I watched his whole face change, like a man who’d stepped off a porch in the dark and missed the bottom step.

“Marj,” he said. “What are you doing out here?” She walked over slow, holding her thermos. She stood next to Opal and looked at her husband. Her voice was so quiet I almost couldn’t hear it from the skidder.

“I came to bring my son a sandwich,” she said. “Since you weren’t going to bring him anything else.”

“Marj, it’s a business. I can’t do recoveries for free just because it’s family.”

“Nobody asked you to do it for free,” she said. “He asked you to come.”

Wilbur opened his mouth and shut it again. “Twenty years, Wilbur,” Marjean said. “Twenty years I have watched you punish that boy for something I did when I was nineteen.”

She took a breath. “I let it go because I thought you’d wear out on it. I thought you’d look at him one day and see a good man instead of Thurman’s son.

But you never did. And today you would have let him lose a week’s work and the skidder payment and his little girl’s boots, just to make him pay for me.”

She didn’t cry. She just stood there. “I’ll ride home with Opal,” she said. “You can think about it on your own.”

And she turned around and walked to Opal’s car and got in the passenger side and shut the door.

Opal looked up at Wilbur for one more second. Then she rolled up her flag and walked back to her car too, and they drove off toward town.

Wilbur stood there in the middle of the road.