A True Gift

I’m a Farmer

“You see that, Jerome? There goes Joe in that stretched out Cadillac. I don’t believe I ever saw him but a few times in anything but his old Ford pickup truck.” I reflected on the fact that the year of Joe’s truck changed over the years and Joe never bought a new truck but he always bought a Ford. When Joe first moved to these parts, he drove in with a ’56 Ford-150, “This bucket of rust got me across four states without so much as one misfire,” Joe had told me, as he patted its fender, on Main Street of our little town. I didn’t know this friend until that day. Our friendship began that day I paused to look at his rough looking truck.

“There they have him in the back of the Cadillac. It doesn’t seem right,” I had to come up to the cross roads to watch my friend go by – I didn’t want to but I did. My nephew sat next to the passenger window in what I am sure some people would consider an old Chevy truck. There were dents from getting to close to a tree or two or farm equipment and there were a couple of good caved in places in the pickup’s body where my old bull tried to duel with me and my truck. My pickup-truck probably didn’t have a straight section on the body and had only been washed by God when He let it rain. They tell me that my nephew, who helped me on the farm, has down-syndrome and they say it like it was supposed to be bad, yet Jerome listened and when Jerome said something it usually shook you to the bones in the wisdom that was in his voice. It was like he knew things – things only God knew. Or maybe it was like Jerome had an eye into heaven. I loved having him with me. He didn’t irritate me like other folks in their superficial thoughts with their worries about this futile thing or that. I watched as all the cars with their headlights turned on followed the Cadillac with my friend Joe laid out in the back. I am glad they were there, because I couldn’t be. Joe was the one that I talked to when I found out that Joseifina had another man and she thought he was a better man then me. Joe was the one who drank whisky with me when my mother died and I couldn’t understand life without her. Joe was the one who held me up when my grandson didn’t come back from Iraq. There will be those who wonder why I wasn’t at the church or at the grave side but I was there when his first born died in his Corvette that Joe bought him and he sobbed – there was no place else to be but sitting out in that pasture with a bottle of Crown and a milk jug of warm water. We passed each bottle back and forth until all the emotion had run out on that prairie grass.

Jerome pulled me out of my memories when he said, “He likes Fords, what was wrong with his flatbed Ford? The one he used to feed his cows. Joe would have fit on it.”

“I think you are right, because that shiny hearse doesn’t cut out right and I never saw him wash any vehicle other than one he took Mary into church in.” “Why did they do that?” Jerome looked at me with the big straight forward eyes he always had. “I don’t know and they probably put Joe in a suit and I never saw him in anything but his bib-overalls even when he was on his way to the Methodist Church with Mary who was always dressed real nice,” I just watched and said, “We are the same; we are farmers.” Then a few rain drops spattered on the windshield in front of us as we watched Joe’s procession. I couldn’t help but smile, “Looks like the rain is here – thank you Jesus – we need the rain and I love the rain the way it makes everything fresh and green.” Jerome smiled, “Joe’s in heaven in his bib-overalls and he’s smiling.”

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Jerome helped me when I found an old “70 Chevy one-ton truck sitting out in the weeds a couple of hours away in Nebraska. The man told me that the engine had a hole in the side of the block and that there was some rust in the cab, but that the truck 4-speed transmission and all else seemed to be just fine. I gave him five-hundred dollars and he gave me a signed title. I looked at the title and realized that he bought the truck when it was a year old. He had had that truck a long time. I watched in him in my rear-view mirror as he watched Jerome and me pull it away. He just stood there until we were out of sight – he was a farmer like me.

Jerome and I got the truck home and soon we had the engine sitting on the floor with the other parts that had to be removed in order to do so laying on benches and tables in the barn where we used to stack hay until the big round bales became the way to put up hay. I had a three-twenty-seven on an engine stand that had come out of a ’67 Chevy Impala. Jerome and I looked it over and decided that all we had to do was change out the water pump from a short nose to a long and all would work. We did so as we had thought and Jerome had a smile that I equate with an angel’s smile (all the angels in the Bible were males and Jerome could have been one as far as I was concerned), when I turned the ignition switch and the desired rumble flowed out of the single exhaust.