through the rest of his Army time and thirty-one years of county school
buses and every engine he had touched in retirement, and its handle,
stamped E.L. by a die set borrowed from the Guard armory, was worn
smoother than any tool Jonah had ever held, smooth in the exact shape of
a working life.
He had given it to Jonah the last winter, not ceremonially - Pap had no
ceremonies left in him by then, the illness had spent them - but
practically, in the kitchen, with the toolbox open between them on the
table his mother was not allowed to put hot pans on. The old man had
taken the wrench out of its slot and put it in Jonah's hand and closed
Jonah's fingers over it with both of his own, which were cold, and said:
"The rest of these tools, you can lose and buy back. This one you can't,
because there's only the one of it and it remembers a trick. You keep it
where your hand knows." Then, because he was Pap and a lesson was not
finished until it had a fence around it, he had added: "A wrench don't care
who your daddy is, boy. It only cares if your hand's honest. Remember
that when you're standing somewhere they don't want you standing."
In September, in the salvage yard behind the county barn, three years
before that winter and two before the illness had a name, Pap had put
Jonah's hand on a barring bar fitted to the flywheel of a junked 8V-71 bus
engine and taught him the liturgy that the rest of this story turns on. Walk
it around slow. One tooth at a time. A two-stroke Detroit talks at barring
speed, Pap said, if it talks at all: eight injectors riding their cams in order,
each one a small, distinct click-feel through the bar and through the
cover, the rack sliding free as a drawer, the valves sighing in sequence.
Count who answers, Pap said. An engine in trouble is an engine with one
voice missing from the choir, and everybody else in the world will stand
around it with a machine that reads numbers, and the numbers will all be
fine, because the numbers only ever describe the parts that are working.
You count the silence, boy. The fault is always living in the silence, in the
one that doesn't answer when its name is called.
By the time Jonah reached the Haskett gate, carrying the box at a pace
that was not quite a run because a run would have announced him, the
yard had begun to collect the way a puddle collects, from every direction
at once and without anybody deciding. The wash bay faced the gravel lot,
and the green truck sat across its doorway at an angle, hood up, front
wheels still wet from Bobby's wash, so that the whole scene presented
itself to the street like a stage nobody had admitted to building. Two of
Vern's regular drivers stood at the fender with their caps in their hands, a
thing Jonah had never seen either of them do indoors or out. A feed-store
clerk leaned on the air pump. Somebody's grandfather had backed his
Oldsmobile in at the gate and stayed in it with the engine running and the
window down, the better to hear, which in Cade's Hollow was understood
to be a form of attendance.
Jonah set the toolbox down in the gravel at the lot's edge, beside the
stacked tires, where a person could stand without having exactly arrived.
He knew the rules of such gatherings the way he knew the rules of church
basements and auction barns: the work had a center, and the center
belonged to men with standing, and standing was measured in years and
certifications and who owed whom money, and a seventeen-year-old with
a borrowed hour off a parts-store floor had none of it. What he had was a
pair of ears that his grandfather had spent a decade training like a pair of
hands, and so he did what Pap had trained them to do. He stopped
watching, which was the hard part, and listened to the yard itself for a
while, to get its key: the air compressor cycling in the main shop, the tick
of cooling metal, a loose chain against the fence in the small wind,
somebody's radio playing the farm report through a truck door speaker,
too far to make words. Under it all, the silence of the green truck, which
had its own quality, different from the silence of a resting machine. A
resting machine ticks and settles and shrinks. This one only sat. It
reminded Jonah, unpleasantly, of the quiet in Pap's room in the last year,
when the old man would lie facing the wall in the middle of the
afternoon, awake, and the quiet had not been rest but a refusal anybody in
the house could hear and nobody could answer.
Dale Proctor arrived at twenty past eight with his light bar still
flashing, as if the truck were a scene he had been assigned, and the yard
rearranged itself around him the way yards do around a man with a
factory shirt and a laptop case and clean boots. Dale was forty-four,