The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

The truck in the lane

A little after two o’clock, Monty’s truck turned into my lane.

I knew it by the sound before I saw it. He had a lifter ticking on that engine for two years and never fixed it.

He pulled up beside my pickup and sat there a minute with the engine running. Tawny was in the passenger seat.

Then he turned it off and got out and walked over toward the pole.

Monty is not a tall man, but he is broad through the shoulders from a life of throwing hay bales.

He had on his good barn coat and his Sunday boots, and he walked like a man who had been told something on the way over that he did not like hearing.

He nodded at Arlo. He nodded at Jeanine and her husband. He did not nod at me.

He walked right up to the base of the spare pole and stopped, the way Arlo had the day before, and looked at what was stapled there at eye level.

The buckle was black and blistered. The tongue had warped in the heat.

You could still see where the stitching had been, a row of little holes around a strap that was no longer there.

Jace came down off the pole and stood a few feet away from his father. He did not say anything. Neither did I. Nobody in that yard said a word.

Monty put out one finger and touched the buckle. He knew what it was.

He had paid for half of Jace’s line school tuition himself, and had driven him up to the college the first day.

“I was at the sale barn,” he said finally. His voice came out rough. “Friday. I didn’t know till last night. She told me he’d taken his things and gone to his mother’s. She didn’t say why.”

“I know where you were,” I said. “Nobody’s blaming you, Monty.”

He looked at Jace. “Did she do this?”

Jace held his father’s eyes. “Yes sir,” he said. “She put the whole bag in the barrel.”

Standing in front of it

Monty turned around and looked at his truck. Tawny was still in the passenger seat, looking straight out the windshield.

“Tawny,” he called. Not loud. “Come here a minute.”

For a while I did not think she would. Then the door opened and she got out and walked over, arms folded across her coat, and stopped about ten feet from the pole.

Jeanine and her husband were standing by the fence. Arlo was in his chair. Nobody moved.

It was so quiet you could hear a crow somewhere across the hollow, and the wind moving the last of the leaves in the oaks.

“Come look at it,” Monty said.

She came the rest of the way. She looked at the buckle. I watched her face.

I think she had told herself it was just a bag of old leather, and here it was stapled to a pole with four grown people standing around it, and it was not just anything anymore.

“I’m not going to say anything ugly to you, Tawny,” I said, and I kept my voice as even as I keep it on the dispatch radio. “But he starts tomorrow. And if you want to make this right, that door is open.”

She did not answer. She did not cry, either. She looked at Jace a long moment, then looked at the ground, then turned and walked back to the truck and got in.

Monty stood there with his hands at his sides. He looked up at the top of the pole, and then at the old hooks on Jace’s boots, and I saw him see the initials on the strap. He had known my daddy well.

“Those your dad’s?” he asked.

“Mine,” I said. “He bought them for me. He scratched his initials in.”

Monty nodded slowly. He reached into his coat and took out his checkbook, wrote something in it with a pen he pulled from his shirt pocket, tore it out and held it out to Jace.

“That’s for the gear,” he said. “Not a loan. And son, you go to work tomorrow. The cows will get fed. I fed cows before you were born.”