Chapter Thirty-Four · Diesel
Chapter Thirty-Four
DIESEL
They set Pike Danner’s stone in September, because that is how long it takes when there is a criminal case attached to a man’s death and nobody tells you that in advance.
It was a Saturday. Del picked it. Grey granite, and she had wanted it plain and had been talked into one thing, which was a small line of raised lettering across the bottom under his name and his dates.
HE WROTE IT DOWN.
There were about two hundred people at Little Bethel for it, which for a stone setting in September is not a normal number, and Diesel Harrow stood at the back with his hand in Evelyn Chase’s and did not have to say anything to anybody, which was the single greatest kindness that town had ever done him.
Afterward, in the church lot, Cutter said, “You going to tell her tonight?”
“Tell who what.”
“Diesel.”
“How do you know about it.”
“Because you asked Renata to hold the mail two weeks ago and Renata told Charlene and Charlene told my mother.” Cutter got his keys out. “You have lived in this town your entire life. What did you think was going to happen.”
The yard did three hundred and ninety weighs in August.
That was the number Diesel kept going back to, because in July of the year before they had done about a hundred and ninety.
Evelyn had raised the price to eighteen dollars and put a sign at the gate. Then she called every one of the nineteen carriers herself and told them there was a certified scale and a shop bay and a place to drop a trailer in Blackthorn Gap. Nine of them started routing through it.
Setzer of Wytheville sent two trucks a week and would not take a discount.
They hired two people in September, which had not happened at Harrow Salvage since 2016. Tim Farrow got his class A and a raise and gave notice on the apartment he had been afraid he would lose in March, and rented a better one in Fincastle, and told everybody about it four separate times.
Diesel went back on the road himself in October, which he had not done in nine years.
There was a reason for it and the reason was Cutter, who had come into the office on a Thursday and said, “You’ve got two drivers and nine weighs a day and a president who sits in a chair,” and had then stood there until Diesel got up.
So he ran a load to Hagerstown on the third of October, alone, up the corridor, past Buchanan, past the Cardinal yard with a FOR LEASE sign on the fence and the shop bay door standing open and empty.
He stopped at the diner across the road and ate breakfast in a booth and did not tell anybody he was going to.
The waitress was about sixty and she poured his coffee without asking and then stopped with the pot in her hand.
“You knew Pike,” she said.
Diesel Harrow put his cup down.
“Yes ma’am.”
“He set right there.” She did not point. She did not have to. “Every third Wednesday for two years. Took his eggs over easy and left three dollars and he’d tell me about his boy at Radford.”
“He would.”
“I read about it in the paper.” The woman’s mouth went. “Wasn’t nothing in there about the boy at Radford.”
“No ma’am. There never is.”
She stood there another second.
“You want them eggs over easy,” she said, and it was not a question, and Diesel Harrow said yes ma’am and ate them and left three dollars.
The trial was set for February, which would be a year almost to the day.
Alton Renner had four lawyers and had given one interview to a business quarterly in which he described himself as the victim of an overzealous prosecution and a motorcycle gang, and Grace Walsh had it pinned to the wall of her office over the hardware store with a note on it that said DO NOT TAKE THIS DOWN.
Boyd Sumner pled in October and would testify.
“He’ll go away,” Grace said, at the table on a Monday night.
“I want to be careful about the word justice in this room, because that’s a word people use when they want to stop paying attention.
He is going to be convicted or he is going to plead, and either way a sixty-six-year-old man with four lawyers gets a number that a fifty-eight-year-old shop manager would never have gotten, and the number will be less than it should be. ”
“Then what did we do,” Scout said.
Grace looked down the table at him.
“Nineteen men who own four trucks apiece are still in business,” she said.
“A pipeline that moved four hundred and eleven loads up this corridor does not exist anymore. Wendell Prine testified about his own leg in a federal courtroom in July and got to say it out loud with a stenographer in the room, and I watched him do it, and he shook for twenty minutes afterward and then he was all right.” She capped her pen.
“And there is a stone at Little Bethel with the truth on it. That’s what you did, Scout.
Don’t ever let anybody tell you it’s small. ”
The club voted in November to open the books.
That was Cutter’s, and Diesel had not seen it coming, and it took three meetings.
What it came to was this: Copperhead would keep an open charter list, a public post office box, a bank account with two signatures on it, and a standing standard that every member’s name and the fact of his membership was a matter anybody could ask about and get answered. Grace wrote the bylaws.
Dutch Voyles voted for it at eighty-one years old and then stood up and said, “Forty-two years we been a closed club because it was the only way to keep this town, and I have lived long enough to find out that a closed room is where they put the thing they don’t want you to see. So.”
He sat down.
It passed sixteen to nothing.
Diesel asked her on a Tuesday in the first week of February, on the porch, at seven in the evening, with the whole eastern face going blue and the woodpile stacked to the eaves for the second winter in a row.
He had thought about doing it at the table.
He had thought about it hard, because the table was where he had said the other thing and because sixteen men would have made a noise about it that she deserved, and he had gotten all the way to the point of arranging it before he understood that he was doing it that way because it would be a good story.
So he did it on the porch, where there was nobody, and where she could say no without a room in it.
“I’ve got a thing to ask you,” Diesel said, “and I want to say up front that there ain’t a wrong answer, and that I’m going to be right here tomorrow either way, and that I’ve been carrying this since about July and I’m telling you that so you know I ain’t sprung it on you.”
Evelyn Chase put down the legal pad.
“Diesel Harrow,” she said. “Are you doing the considerate version?”
“I am doing the considerate version.”
“Do it faster.”
He got down on one knee on his own porch boards, which pulled at the old injury and hurt considerably, and got the ring out of his shirt pocket, and looked up at a woman who had come down that road in February with four hundred dollars and a hard drive.
“Evelyn,” he said. “Stay.”
She was already crying and she was also, he saw, laughing.
“That’s the whole proposal?”
“That’s the whole proposal. I’ve been working on it since July and that’s what it come down to.
” He held the ring where she could see it.
“You come down that mountain in a car that wouldn’t run because you didn’t have anywhere to go, and you have had somewhere to go since about March, and you’re still here.
So I’m asking you on purpose, out loud, where you can say no. ”
“Yes,” Evelyn said.
“You want to hear the rest?”
“There’s a rest?”
“There’s about four minutes of a rest and I have practiced it and I would like to say it,” Diesel said, “but I’m on one knee and it’s my left side so I’d take it kindly if you’d say yes first.”
“I did say yes.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes.”
She got him up off the boards, which took both of them, and then she got the ring on and then she had two fistfuls of his shirt and said, into his mouth, “Say the rest of it on the couch, you idiot,” and he did, most of it, eventually.
The rest of it, for the record, went like this.
He told her he had spent forty-two years in a house where the decent thing was the thing you did without telling anybody, and that he had learned that from a good man who had been wrong about it, and that he was going to be relearning it for the rest of his life and would probably fail at it on a Tuesday sometime in the next month.
He told her that the first night she came into that yard he had crouched down so she would not have to look up at him, and that he had meant it, and that he had been doing some version of it every day since and intended to keep doing it.
He told her that she had walked into a club that had been closed for forty-two years and had not asked one man in it to make room, and had simply been useful until there was no version of the room without her in it.
He told her that Pike Danner had gone home and told his wife that a woman asked him forty-one questions and not one of them was whether he done it, and that as long as Diesel Harrow was alive there would be somebody in this county who knew that sentence.
And then he told her the last part, which she had not known, and which he had been carrying since a hospital room in March.
“I was on the gravel,” he said, “and I had about one word, and I want you to know what it was for. It wasn’t for them. I’ve had eleven months to be honest about it and it wasn’t for them.”
“Say it.”
“If eleven men cross that lot, somebody dies, and it’s a boy with a phone or it’s Cinder, and then this club is what he needed it to be and everything you built goes in a drawer.
” His voice went. “And you’d have done all of it for nothing, on my account, twice.
So I said hold, and I want you to know that the thing I was holding onto was you. ”
Evelyn Chase did not say anything at all for a while.
“That’s better than four minutes’ worth,” she said finally.
“It come out longer than I practiced.”
They were married at Little Bethel on the second Saturday in May.
Grace Walsh stood up with her. Cutter Reeves stood up with him.
Del Danner sat in the second row on the left with Dorene Voyles, and when Evelyn came down that aisle in a dress that Charlene from Rowe’s had altered for free and refused to discuss, Del Danner reached out and took her hand as she went by and did not let go for about four steps.
There were sixteen bikes in that lot and two hundred people in that church and a certified public scale twelve miles away that had done six hundred and four weighs in April.
Renata Sowder cried the entire time and denied it afterward.
The five bulkheads came back on a Thursday in June, a month after the wedding.
Evelyn had never stopped. Diesel had learned to live beside that in her and stopped trying to manage it sometime around Christmas: Wendell Prine’s notebook accounted for twenty of the twenty-four plates by trailer number, and Danielle Ford had recovered three of the five that were left, and Evelyn Chase had spent nine months not saying one word about the last two and thinking about them every day.
She came out onto the porch with a scale ticket in her hand.
It was a Harrow ticket. New stock, the ones with the second line for the carrier name that she had added in July.
“Trailer 8817,” she said.
Diesel put his coffee down.
“That’s Prine’s number.”
“That is the trailer number Wendell Prine wrote in a notebook in a coffee can, and it was seized by the government in March, and it is sitting in a federal impound lot in Roanoke, and it has been there for fifteen months.” Evelyn’s voice was doing the thing it did.
“And it crossed our scale at eleven forty last night. Eighteen dollars. Cash.”
“Somebody’s using the number.”
“Somebody is running a trailer with that number on the nose,” Evelyn said, “and Renata wrote the plate down.”
Diesel Harrow stood up off his own porch step and looked out at eighty miles of Blue Ridge going blue in the evening, ridge behind ridge behind ridge, all the way to where they stopped.
Then he put his hand out for the ticket.
“All right,” he said. “Get Grace on the phone, and tell her to bring the legal pad, and tell Cutter to call church for tomorrow night.”
“All sixteen?”
“All sixteen,” Diesel said. “And the town, if it wants to come. We ain’t doing it in a closed room anymore.”
Evelyn Chase went inside for the phone.
Diesel stood on the porch with a scale ticket in his hand, eighteen dollars, cash, eleven forty at night, in Renata Sowder’s careful print with the plate written in the corner because a fellow stole a welder off somebody in 1986 and a woman lost four hundred dollars on a disputed weight in 2013 and neither of them ever got over it.
That was the whole thing, he thought. That was the entire war, start to finish.
A man in Roanoke had built four states of architecture out of shell companies and lawyers and a Delaware mailbox, and it had come apart because a fabricator in Buchanan wanted forty-one thousand six hundred dollars, and a shop manager kept a notebook in a coffee can, and a driver wrote seal numbers down by flashlight for fourteen years in case anybody ever asked, and a woman at a scale booth wrote the plate on every ticket.
None of them had known one another. Not one of them had known they were doing anything at all.
That was what a place was, and it had taken Diesel Harrow forty-two years and a dead friend to find out: not a closed road and a locked gate and one man carrying it. A few hundred people writing things down.
Behind him the screen door banged and Evelyn came back out with the phone against her ear and her free hand already reaching for the ticket, and out past the yard the light went off the last ridge and the whole valley below Blackthorn Gap filled up blue.
“Grace,” she said. “It’s Evelyn. Get a pen.”