Chapter Twenty-Four · Diesel
Chapter Twenty-Four
DIESEL
The house was wrong at nine o’clock that night and it took Diesel most of an hour to work out why, and the answer was that it was quiet in a way it had not been in six weeks.
There was no pencil on the table. There was no laptop humming.
The third chair was pushed back where somebody had gotten up from it in a hurry on Friday evening and nobody had straightened it since, and the stove had gone out because he had not come home to build it, and the whole place smelled like cold ash.
He built the fire. He did not eat.
At half past ten he took the extra blanket off the back of the couch and stood in the hall with it in his hands for a minute like an idiot, and then put it back, and went to bed on his own side out of habit and lay there.
She had not taken the front bedroom, and that kept snagging him.
She had not gone down the hall and shut a door and made a point of it.
She had gotten in a truck with his vice president and gone to Fincastle, and had told him why, in order, without one word of it designed to hurt him, and had cried about it and been furious that she was crying.
There was no argument to win. He turned it over twenty ways looking for the place where he had been misunderstood and there was not one.
That was new.
Saturday was the funeral and Diesel did not know afterward how he had gotten through it, except that he had, and that a great many people had made it possible without appearing to do anything at all.
They buried Pike Danner at Little Bethel with four hundred people, which is what happens when a man has driven a truck out of the same county for twenty-six years.
The line of bikes went past the church and around the bend and out of sight.
Two dozen tractor-trailers came, from four states, with their marker lights on, and parked nose out along the road in a row, and the drivers stood beside them with their hats in their hands during the graveside, and Diesel did not recognize most of them.
Nine of them were carriers off Grace’s list.
Setzer, from Wytheville, whose shop had burned, came up to him afterward in the church lot and shook his hand and did not let go of it.
“I read it,” Setzer said. “The whole book. Twice.”
“I’m glad.”
“My brother’s got a bad heart and he read it out loud to him.” The man’s jaw was working. “Whatever y’all are doing next, our name’s on it.”
Del Danner stood at the head of the grave in a black coat with a laminated name tag no longer around her neck, and she never once turned toward Diesel Harrow all day, and she did not have to, because when it was over she came and found him at the fence and took hold of his coat with both hands and said, “Wednesday. Your kitchen. You’re going to tell me the thing. ”
And Evelyn Chase stood with the club, in the second row, on the far side, exactly where she had said she would be, and Del Danner reached back at one point during the service without turning around and Evelyn took her hand.
Church ran Monday at seven and every patch in Blackthorn Gap was in the room again, sixteen men, and this time Diesel did not stand at the head of the table.
He stood at the corner of it where the light was.
“Before anything,” he said. “This ain’t about Renner tonight. This is about me, and I’m going to tell it long, and then I’m going to sit down and Cutter’s going to run the rest of it.”
It took him twenty-six minutes.
He did not shave one thing off it. He said what Scout had brought him and what he had told Scout to do with it.
He said the lie in the shop and named it as a lie and said Cutter had counted it out loud at the time.
He said Cecil Ammen’s hitch and how it had felt like proof.
He said what he had done to the schedule and what he had said to Pike Danner’s face on a creeper in the shop, word for word, and there was a sound in the room when he got to that part.
He said the left hand.
And then he said the last part, which was the only part he had not been able to get through on the drive down.
“He asked me if he’d done something,” Diesel said. “In the shop. With his cap in his hands. And I had it in a drawer forty feet away, and I told him no, and I gave him a good enough reason that he thanked me for it and went home and ate his supper.”
Sixteen men sat in that room and not one of them moved.
“That’s what happened,” he said. “There ain’t a version where I didn’t know better.
Cutter told me to my face I was lying, in the moment, and I did it anyway, and Grace says that if I’d put that card on her table the day I got it we’d have had a subpoena and a phone number inside a week.
” He set his knuckles on the oak. “So I’m calling the vote on myself, and I want it done tonight, and I want it done proper with everybody in the room. ”
Nobody moved.
Then Cinder Sullivan stood up.
“Boss.”
“Say it. You told me it was coming and I’ve had the weekend.”
“I have had a speech since Friday night,” Cinder said. “I wrote parts of it in my head at that creek. It’s a hell of a speech and I ain’t going to give it, and I’ll tell you why.”
“Go ahead.”
“Because I sat down in that church parking lot two weeks ago and let you talk me out of burning that shop, and I sat down again in this room when Pike asked us to keep it clean.” Cinder’s voice was rough.
“And every man in here knows that if I’d got my way we’d have destroyed the only physical evidence in the county three weeks before somebody stole the trailer.
So I’ve been wrong at least as loud as you have, and mine would’ve cost the case, and yours cost a man, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’ve got the high ground because my mistake didn’t get to happen. ”
He sat down.
“That ain’t a vote,” Dutch Voyles said.
“No sir. My vote’s no. I’m voting he stays.” Cinder put his hands on the table. “And I want it wrote down that I’m voting that way with my whole chest, and that Monday next I am going to be the loudest man in this room about what we do to Alton Renner, and that’s a separate matter.”
They went around.
It took forty minutes because Diesel made them talk, and because some of them needed to say a thing before they could vote, and because Dutch Voyles at eighty-one took six minutes to say that a club that gets rid of a man the week his friend dies is not a club, and that he had watched that happen at another table in 1979 and it had ended that table inside two years.
The vote was thirteen to three to keep him.
Diesel sat with it.
Then he said, “I’d like to hand the gavel to Cutter till this is done,” and got about four words into the reason before Cutter Reeves cut him off, which Cutter had not done in front of the club in fifteen years.
“No,” Cutter said.
“Cutter.”
“No, and I want everybody in this room to hear why, because this is the whole disease and I’d like it named out loud.
” He stood up. “Sixteen men just voted. Thirteen of ’em said stay.
And your first instinct, four seconds later, is to overrule the vote because you have privately decided you don’t deserve it. ”
Diesel opened his mouth and shut it.
“That is the exact same move,” Cutter said. “It looks humble and it’s the same move. You’d be sitting in your own judgment above ours, same as you did with that card, and I ain’t standing for it twice in one week.”
Dutch Voyles said, “Hear him.”
“You want to make it right, you take the gavel and you carry it, and you do this thing in front of us from here on out.” Cutter sat back down. “That’s harder. That’s the point.”
Diesel Harrow stood at the corner of his own table with sixteen men looking at him and understood that he was being told, by the person who had the standing to tell him, that accepting a thing he had not earned was going to be the price of it.
“All right,” he said.
Del Danner came up his mountain Wednesday at six in the morning and Diesel made coffee and told her the thing.
He told it the way he had told it to the club, all of it, in order, and it took him a little over twenty minutes because he had to stop twice.
Del sat at his kitchen table in the chair that had been against the wall and listened with both hands around a cup, and when he was finished she sat with it a long while.
“He come home Wednesday and ate his supper,” she said finally.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You knew why he took that run before anybody found him.”
“I did.”
“And you got down on your knee in front of me anyhow.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Del Danner turned the cup around on the table.
“I want to tell you two things and then I’m going to go home, because I’ve got his mother coming at nine,” she said. “The first one is that I’m angry at you and I’m going to be for a long while, and I’d rather you didn’t try to shorten it. It ain’t yours to shorten.”
“No ma’am.”
“The second one.” She looked up and her eyes were dry and terrible.
“Pike Danner spent twenty-six years in that yard and thirty years in that club, and there was not one day of it he’d have swapped.
He drove a truck for a man he’d have followed into a fire, and when I asked him one time why he never took the shop foreman job, he said, Del, I’d have to tell men what to do. ”
Diesel put his hand over his mouth.
“So don’t you go telling my husband’s story as a thing you did to him,” Del Danner said. “There’s a man in Roanoke gets that. You get the part where you didn’t tell him, and that’s a real part and it’s yours and you’ll carry it. But you ain’t taking the rest of him.”
She stood up and put her cup in his sink and rinsed it, which undid him more than anything else in the entire week.
“Wednesday next,” she said. “Same time. I’ll bring something.”
Cecil Ammen came to Grace’s office Wednesday morning with a cardboard tube under his arm and would not let anybody else carry it up the stairs.
Diesel was there. Grace was there with a court reporter out of Roanoke and a videographer and a notary and a stack of exhibit stickers, and Evelyn was there in a chair against the wall with a legal pad, and she had said good morning to him and he had said it back and that had been all of it, and it had been fine, and it had been the longest forty seconds of his week.
The deposition ran four hours.
Cecil Ammen was seventy-six and he was a better witness than any of them had any right to expect, because he did not embroider one single thing and because when he did not know he said so, and Grace had told him that morning that the four best words in a deposition are I don’t remember that.
Then at twenty of noon they got to the tube.
He uncapped it and drew the print out and unrolled it on the table and put a coffee cup on each corner, and Diesel Harrow looked down at a hand-drawn shop print on yellowed vellum, done in pencil and ink, twenty-eight inches by forty.
BULKHEAD ASSEMBLY. 1/4 PLATE. CONTINUOUS HINGE. CAM LATCH. GASKET CHANNEL PER SECTION B.
And in the title block in the lower right corner, in the printed boxes of a drawing sheet:
JOB: CCC BAY 2 QTY: 24 REQ’D DATE: 3-14-19 DRAWN: R.T.A. APPROVED: A.R.
Grace put her hand flat on the table and left it there.
“Mr. Ammen,” she said, and her voice was doing something. “The line that says approved. Do you know how that gets filled in?”
“Customer fills it in.”
“On the original?”
“On the original. That’s how you know it’s a go.” Cecil Ammen tapped the corner with a knuckle. “I don’t cut nothing till a man signs off on my sheet. Been that way fifty years. You cut twenty-four of anything to a bad number and don’t have that block filled, you eat it.”
“Who filled it in?”
“Fella in the good coat brung it back signed.”
“Signed by whom?”
“I don’t know his name and I never met him.” The old man shrugged. “I ain’t going to sit here and say I did.”
“Mr. Ammen.” Grace’s pen had not moved. “Is there anything else on that drawing that came from you?”
Cecil Ammen turned the print over.
On the back, in the lower corner, in soft carpenter’s pencil gone furry with six years:
2nd man 5/2/19 checked fit. Blk F250 no cap. VA plate.
And under it, seven characters.
“I write down every vehicle that comes on my yard,” Cecil Ammen said. “Have since a fella stole a welder off me in 1986.”
Nobody in that room breathed.
Then Evelyn Chase said, from the chair against the wall, in a voice that Diesel had not heard in five days:
“Grace. That’s a plate.”
Grace Walsh put both hands over her face for exactly two seconds, which was the most emotion Diesel had ever seen out of her in a professional setting, and then took them away and turned to the court reporter and said, “Mark the reverse of Exhibit 14 as 14-A and read that back to me character by character.”
They read it back character by character.
Nobody in that room wrote it on a phone. Grace made them do it on paper, twice, in two hands, and had Cecil Ammen initial both, and had the videographer shoot the back of the print from four angles with a scale in frame.
And across the table, Evelyn looked up from her legal pad, and after five days of not doing it she looked straight at Diesel Harrow, and she did not smile and she did not soften.
“A truck that came to Buchanan on a Thursday in 2019 to check the fit,” she said, “and had to be somebody who could measure a diagonal. That’s the second man. That’s the walk.”
“Yeah,” Diesel said.
“Then let’s go find out whose it is,” Evelyn said, “and this time everybody in this room finds out at the same minute.”