Nobody wanted to disappoint PawPaw. That extended to his machines and animals, too!
PawPaw’s truck was older than some of the commandments and twice as stubborn.
A blue and white Chevrolet half-ton with faded paint that had peeled off in long strips, the way sunburned skin does when you forget your hat at the lake. The thing rattled like two skeletons fightin’ in a drum barrel, and nobody could ever figure out how it kept runnin’. PawPaw said it ran entirely on habit and spite, and I believed him.
It was the only truck I ever knew that coughed before it started.
Not a mechanical cough, mind you. A human one, as though the engine was clearin’ its throat before doin’ something painful. PawPaw would pat the dashboard real gentle, murmurin’ reassurances like he was talkin’ to a skittish mule.
“Come on now, don’t shame me in front of the boy.”
Then he’d tell me to turn the key. PawPaw never drove. I never saw him behind the steering wheel of anything in my life.
The truck would sputter.
Wheeze.
Shake from the radiator to the tailgate.
Then roar to life with all the indignation of a man wakin’ from a nap he didn’t want to end.
That truck should have died somewhere around 1967, but PawPaw was one of those men who refused to accept the possibility that anything he owned might be mortal.
If a hose busted, he wrapped it in black tape so tight it could’ve survived a tornado.
If the muffler fell off, he wired it back on with a coat hanger.
Of course, there was no air conditioner, he rolled the windows down and hollered at anyone complainin’ about the heat to “toughen up, you ain’t made of sugar.”
The seat had lost its stuffing ten years before I was born. When you sat on the passenger side, you were sittin’ on nothing but springs, determination, and whatever fortitude the Lord gave you at birth. To make matters worse, that truck hit potholes on purpose. I swear it did. He claimed the truck steered better if you “kept her surprised.”
The radio didn’t work, except during thunderstorms, when it picked up preachers from seven counties away warnin’ of judgment. PawPaw said that was the truck’s way of remindin’ us to behave. I am not sure I ever believed that, but I never argued, either.
I remember ridin’ shotgun with him and Daddy on a late March mornin’. Fog lay thick along Terrapin Creek, and that old truck creaked and moaned as though the cold had gotten into its bones. Daddy tapped the gas pedal, coaxin’ the engine like a man persuadin’ a stubborn dog out of a warm house.
“You gotta treat these old machines like kin,” he said.
“You fuss at ’em too much, they break.
You fuss too little, they forget they’re alive.”
I asked him why he never bought a new truck.
“New things give up too easy,” he said.
“A little complication, and they shut down. But this one?
This one’ll run on spit and vinegar if I ask it to.”
And he was right.
I saw that truck haul firewood, lumber, feed sacks, deer stands, busted refrigerators, three cousins, two dogs, and one goat that regretted its life choices. It climbed hills no sane vehicle would attempt and rolled across washed-out dirt roads so rough they could have jarred the teeth out of a brick wall.
But PawPaw’s truck never complained.
Not once.
When he passed, folks wondered if that old Chevy would finally breathe its last. But it didn’t. Daddy said he cranked it up after the funeral, and the engine caught on the first try, soft and steady, like it knew the one man it lived for was gone and it was tryin’ to behave in his memory.
We kept it for a while.
Used it for haulin’ limbs, takin’ trash to the dump, or just ridin’ down backroads on quiet Sunday afternoons. But it was never the same without PawPaw in the shotgun seat, tellin’ the engine to “quit bein’ contrary” every time it hiccupped.
I reckon no truck on God’s earth will ever match that one.
Not because it was powerful.
Not because it was pretty.
But because it carried a man who refused to quit, and some part of him rubbed off on it.
Folks say a man’s character shows in the way he keeps his tools.
And if that’s true, PawPaw’s character was as clear as the cracked paint on that truck’s hood.
Stubborn.
Reliable.
A little rough around the edges.
And built to outlast the odds.
Sometimes, when the spring wind hits just right or a gravel road crunches under my tires, I swear I can hear that old Chevy coughin’, crankin’, and rumblin’ its way through memory.
Same as PawPaw.
Still runnin’.
Still refusin’ to quit.
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
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