Then there was the money.
I made a list on the legal pad, the way I would for any customer at the co-op.
The crankshaft would need to go to a machine shop to be ground and polished. That would run about $280. A rebuild kit with new pistons, rings, rod bearings, main bearings, cam bearings, and a full gasket set would be about $640 from a parts company in Lincoln. A new oil pump, $85. A new timing chain set, $70. The connecting rods needed reconditioning, maybe $180 at the machine shop. Then oil, filters, coolant, and spark plugs, about $90. If the cylinders needed boring, another $300 or so.
That came to somewhere between $1,350 and $1,700, depending on what I found when I opened it up.
I had the money. I had a savings account at the bank in Fairfield with about $9,000 in it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough.
What I didn’t have was four hands.
The next morning, I drove to the co-op elevator at eight o’clock instead of going to the shop.
The coffee crowd was there in their folding chairs: Kenny Dvorak, Bud Simanek, Duane Kohler, the Pospisil brothers. And in the two chairs closest to the coffee pot, where they’d sat for twenty years, Lowell Fisk and Beryl Unger.
Lowell is eighty-one. Beryl is seventy-six. Between them, they ran the co-op’s repair shop for fifty years, from 1968 until they retired in 2018. They trained me when I came on in 1997, back when nobody else in the shop would let a woman touch a wrench. They kept every grain truck, tractor, and combine in Clay County running through blizzards, droughts, and the farm crisis of the eighties.
Lowell is tall and stooped, with enormous ears and a slow, careful way of talking. Beryl is short and round, with thick glasses and a laugh you can hear across a parking lot. Beryl’s hands shake now, from a tremor his doctor in Hastings says is benign. He can’t hold a coffee cup without spilling it.
I sat down in a folding chair across from them, and I told them what happened. The Sunday. The section road. The knock. The three hundred dollars. The 352 block Trace wanted for his race car.
When I finished, nobody in the elevator office said anything for a while.
Then Lowell set his coffee cup down on the folding table, very carefully.
“Saturday?” he said.
“Saturday,” Beryl said.
I didn’t even have to ask.
I called the co-op manager, a young man named Josh Pavlik, and asked whether I could borrow the portable engine hoist from the shop.
“For what?”
“My mother’s truck. Her grandson blew the engine. Lowell and Beryl are going to help me rebuild it in her driveway.”
Josh was quiet for a second. “Lowell Fisk and Beryl Unger?”
“Yes.”
“Nora, those guys are eighty.”
“Eighty-one and seventy-six.”
He laughed. “Take the hoist. Take the engine stand too. And the parts washer. And whatever else you need.” He paused. “Tell Lowell he still owes me a donut from last Thursday.”
On Saturday morning, Lowell and Beryl showed up at Mom’s farmhouse at seven-thirty in Lowell’s old Chevy, wearing seed caps and flannel shirts, carrying a red toolbox apiece. Beryl had brought a thermos of coffee and a sack of cinnamon rolls from the bakery in Clay Center.
Mom came out on the porch in her green cardigan. She’d set up a webbed aluminum lawn chair at the edge of the gravel, right beside the truck.
“I’m going to watch,” she announced. “If you don’t mind.”
“Evelyn,” Lowell said, tipping his cap, “we’d be honored.”
We pulled the engine that first Saturday, right there in the gravel.
It took us six hours. We drained the coolant and the oil, and unbolted the radiator, the fan, the alternator, the starter, the exhaust manifolds, the carburetor, and the wiring harness. Lowell labeled every wire with a piece of masking tape and a ballpoint pen. Beryl put every bolt in a coffee can, with a note written on the lid saying where it came from.
“You don’t remember where it goes,” Lowell said. “You write down where it goes. That’s the difference between a mechanic and a guy with tools.”
When everything was loose, I rolled the co-op’s engine hoist up to the front of the truck and hooked the chain to the engine. Lowell guided it from one side. Beryl, with his shaking hands, steadied it from the other.
“Easy,” Lowell said. “Easy. She’s coming.”
The 352 came up out of the engine bay slowly, swinging a little on the chain. Six hundred pounds of cast iron that had been sitting in that truck since 1966. Under it, the engine bay was a cave of dust and old grease.
I lowered it onto the engine stand, and we bolted it down.
Mom sat in her lawn chair the whole time, watching every bolt come out. She didn’t say much. Once, she got up and brought us glasses of iced tea. Once, she went inside and came back with a plate of egg salad sandwiches.
Around four o’clock, she said, very quietly, “Harlan would’ve liked this.”
Lowell looked at her. “Harlan would’ve been out here telling us we were doing it wrong.”
Mom laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh since Sunday.
On Sunday, I took the engine apart on the stand in Mom’s machine shed.
When I pulled off the oil pan, I found exactly what I expected. The number six connecting rod bearing had spun in its seat. The soft bearing metal had worn away completely, and the steel rod had been grinding directly against the crankshaft. The crankshaft journal was scored and blue from the heat.
The rest of the engine was in surprisingly good shape. The cylinder walls were smooth. The pistons looked fine. The camshaft was barely worn.
Dad’s oil changes every three thousand miles, all written down in that little spiral notebook, had kept that engine healthy for thirty years.
All it took to ruin it was one Sunday afternoon on a gravel road.
On Monday, I drove the crankshaft and the connecting rods to the machine shop in Hastings, a small, dusty place run by a man named Gordy Bauer, who’d been grinding crankshafts since the Nixon administration.
He held the crank up to the light and turned it slowly, looking at the scored journal.
“Somebody ran this wide open,” he said.
“My nephew.”
“Racing?”
“On the gravel. Against the Hofmeister boy.”
Gordy grunted. “Kids think an engine is a light switch. On, off.” He set the crank down on his bench. “I can grind it ten under. Polish it. It’ll be good as new. Two hundred and eighty, plus the rods. Ready Thursday.”
“Thank you, Gordy.”
“Whose truck is it?”
“My mother’s. My dad’s, really. Harlan Brandt.”
Gordy looked up sharply. “Harlan Brandt? The ’66 with the two-tone?” He shook his head slowly. “I rebuilt the carburetor on that truck in 1996. Harlan sat right there on that stool and talked my ear off about the Huskers for two hours.” He picked up the crank again and looked at it differently. “I’ll do it for two-fifty. And I’ll have it Wednesday.”
I ordered the rebuild kit from the parts company in Lincoln that night, on my laptop at Mom’s kitchen table. Pistons, rings, bearings, gaskets, a new oil pump, a timing chain. $868 with shipping. I paid for it out of my savings account and wrote it down in a new spiral notebook. On the cover, I wrote the same thing Dad had written on his: F-100.
The total so far was $1,118.
Mom watched me type in my credit card number.
“Nora, let me pay for that.”
“No, Mom.”
“It’s my truck.”
“It’s my nephew who broke it,” I said. “And it’s my brother who isn’t here.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Have you called Kurt?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to?”
“When it’s done,” I said. “I want to tell him it’s fixed. Not that it’s broken.”
She nodded slowly. Then she reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
“Your father always said you were the only one of us who could fix anything,” she said. “He was right.”
The second Saturday, we washed every part by hand.
Josh at the co-op had let us borrow the big parts washer from the shop, a steel tub of solvent with a pump and a brush. We set it up in Mom’s machine shed. Lowell, Beryl, and I spent the whole day cleaning every piece of that engine. The block, the heads, the intake manifold, the oil pan, the valve covers, every bolt and washer and spring.
It’s slow, dirty, boring work. You scrub every surface with a brass brush in the solvent until it’s clean enough to eat off. Then you blow it dry with compressed air and wipe it down with clean shop rags.
Beryl couldn’t hold a brush steady with his tremor, so he sat on an overturned bucket and sorted bolts into coffee cans by size, peering at each one through his thick glasses.
“I used to be able to rebuild a carburetor blindfolded,” he said, a little bitterly. “Now I can’t hold a coffee cup.”
“You can sort bolts,” Lowell said.
“Any kid can sort bolts.”
“Any kid doesn’t know which bolts go where,” Lowell said. “You do.”
Beryl grunted, but he looked pleased.
Around noon, Mom brought out a pot of chili and a pan of cornbread and set it on a sheet of plywood across two sawhorses. We ate standing up, in our greasy clothes, in the cool shade of the machine shed.
“Evelyn,” Lowell said, “this chili is better than Harlan ever deserved.”
“He told me it was too spicy every single time,” Mom said. “Every single time, for fifty-one years. And every single time he had two bowls.”
Lowell laughed so hard he had to set down his spoon.
That afternoon, while we were scrubbing the cylinder heads, a car slowed down on the gravel road in front of the farmhouse.
It was Trace’s black Dodge.
He slowed down to almost a crawl, looking at the yard: the engine on the stand, the parts washer, the three of us bent over the heads, Mom in her lawn chair.
He didn’t stop. He sped up and drove on toward town.
“That the grandson?” Beryl asked.
“That’s him.”
Beryl adjusted his glasses and watched the Dodge disappear down the road in a cloud of dust.
“He’ll be back,” Beryl said.
“How do you know?”
“Because he slowed down,” Beryl said. “A boy who doesn’t care doesn’t slow down.”
On Wednesday, I picked up the crankshaft and rods from Gordy Bauer in Hastings. The crank was ground and polished to a mirror finish. The rods were reconditioned and boxed up neatly. Gordy’s bill came to $412 for everything, and he’d written at the bottom of the invoice in pencil: For Harlan.
That brought the total to $1,530.
That night, my brother Kurt called me from North Dakota.
“Nora, what’s going on with Dad’s truck? Trace called me last night. He sounded weird.”
