The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

I cooked lunch at the school in town for nineteen years. I knew which kids hated peas and which ones would eat a second helping of anything if you smiled at them. I loved it more than I can say.

But our son had gone into the Army that summer, and our daughter had started nursing school in Hays.

The house got so quiet in September that I could hear the clock in the hall from the kitchen.

Bertram Lusk came into the school one afternoon in October to fix the walk-in cooler for his nephew, who did our maintenance.

Bertram has hauled cattle out of Gove County for almost forty years.

He was standing at the back door, drinking a carton of milk I had given him, and he said he could not find drivers.

He said the young ones went to the oil field and the old ones were retiring.

“I’d hire anybody who could pass the test and show up at four in the morning,” he said. “Man or woman, I don’t care.”

I said, “I show up at five-thirty every day of the school year.”

He looked at me over that milk carton for a long time.

Then he said, “You’d have to go through school. Three or four weeks. I’d help you with it if you’d drive for me after.”

I went home and told Emmett. I expected him to laugh. He didn’t. He said, “You’d be good at it. You don’t rattle.” That was the whole conversation, and it was enough.

So by Thanksgiving I had my permit book half memorized, and I had told the family because I did not want to hide it.

That was my mistake, maybe, or maybe it was the best thing I ever did.

I started driving school the second week of January. It was a three-hour drive each way, so I stayed in a motel with two other students during the week and came home on Friday nights.

One was a farm kid from Nebraska, maybe twenty-two, who already knew more about trucks than I did.

The other was a man about my age who had been laid off from a packing plant. Both of them were kind to me.

The first thing they teach you is the pre-trip inspection. You walk around the whole truck and trailer and name every part out loud and say what you are checking it for.

Steering box, not leaking. Pitman arm, not bent or cracked. Air lines, not chafed.

I said those words to myself in the shower, in the motel, and on the drive home on Fridays until Emmett started saying them back to me.

Then there is the air brake test. You build the air up, you shut the engine off, you check for leaks, you fan the brakes down until the warning buzzer comes on and the valves pop. You have to know the numbers cold.

Emmett quizzed me on air brakes every Saturday at supper. He would hold up a fork and say “Low air warning,” and I would say “Before the pressure drops below sixty,” and he would nod and pass me the potatoes.

The backing was the hard part. Everybody in that school said so, and everybody in that school was right.

They had a range behind the building, a big gravel lot with orange cones and painted lines, and in January it was frozen so hard the cones would not sit straight. We practiced straight-line backing, offset backing, and the alley dock.