The Truck Nobody Comes to Fix

The week she died there were sometimes six trucks in that yard at once and he had to ask a man to move so the funeral home could get in.

Every one of them came. The whole road came. Men he had not spoken to properly in eleven years stood in that yard with their hats off, and somebody he barely knew brought a generator over because the freezer had gone out, and two of them stayed until eleven at night on the Thursday putting the chairs back in the church.

That was fourteen months ago.

Since then there has been one truck in that yard, and it is his.

Nobody did anything wrong. He would fight a man who said they had. Those are good people with cattle of their own and knees that are going and grandchildren three hours away, and every one of them would come tomorrow if he called.

He is not going to call. That is the other half of it and he knows exactly how that sounds.

The Ford is still up on blocks by the barn. Sixty six, three quarter ton, and he had been rebuilding it for two years and she used to bring the coffee out at about four and sit on the tailgate of the other truck and tell him it was never going to run. The hood has been open since April of last year.

He goes out there most afternoons. He puts a hand on the fender. He does not do any work on it.

And what he would not say to a living soul is that the empty yard is worse than the funeral was, and that some days the only voice he hears out loud is his own telling the dog to get out of the way.

If that is a yard anybody knows, sit down here a minute, because there is a psalm about this and it is blunter than most people expect.

The psalm does not pretend the yard is full

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice that it does not argue with the situation.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Read the first half. It does not say if. It says when.

That is Scripture conceding the thing outright. The people who are supposed to be there are not going to always be there. The psalm does not scold anybody for it, does not call them faithless, does not tell the singer to try harder at friendship. It states it as a plain fact about how life on this earth actually runs, and then it says what happens next.

Then the LORD will take me up. That is the word for gathering something in off the ground.

You are gathered up by the one who does not have cattle to see to, and you were gathered up on every afternoon this yard stayed empty. Psalm 27:10 is the written word admitting the emptiness and answering it in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that verse plain enough for a man in a yard.

There is a mercy in the bluntness of it. A psalm that promised the trucks would keep coming would be a lie, and a man out here would find that out inside two weeks and then have one more thing he could not trust.

You have not been handed a promise that will not hold, and you were never asked to expect from men what only the Lord undertook. Psalm 27:10 draws that line itself, and the Spirit of God is not standing in that yard disappointed in anybody's neighbors.

Nobody is guilty here

Now I want to head something off, because a man alone in a yard for fourteen months will build a case whether he means to or not.

Those men did not abandon anybody. They did what a road does. A road turns out in force for a death and then goes back to its own barns, because a road has to, and if it did not there would be nobody left to turn out the next time.

And here is the part that is nobody's fault at all. Everybody on that road has assumed for fourteen months that somebody else is going out there. The man three miles down thinks the son visits. The son thinks the neighbors call in. Every single one of them believes the yard has traffic in it.

That is not neglect. That is the ordinary arithmetic of a scattered country, and it happens to nearly every widower on nearly every road in this county.

So keep them. Keep every one of them, including the one who brought the generator, and do not let fourteen months turn into a ledger, because a ledger will cost you the road and it will not bring anybody up the lane.

Right now, as you read this, you are kept company by one who never assumed somebody else was going, and you were never left to the arithmetic. Psalm 27:10 says the Lord takes a man up when the others do not, and His Spirit has been out at that fender every afternoon since April of last year.

The truck up on blocks

Now let me say something about that Ford, because it is not really a truck any more and I think you know that.

Nobody has touched that engine in fourteen months. That is not laziness and it is not depression in the way a doctor would mean it. It is because finishing it would mean finishing it without her, and the hood being open is the last part of the arrangement that still has both of them in it.

Leave it open. There is nothing wrong with you.

But hear this, because it matters. The reason you go out there is not the truck. It is that the yard at four in the afternoon is the place where she is most nearly present, and a man needs somewhere like that, and Scripture has no objection to it whatsoever.

Jacob set up a stone and named the place. David kept a lame man at his table for the sake of a dead friend. There is nothing in the written word that tells a grieving man to tidy up the places where the person still is.

You are not stuck by standing at that fender, and you were never obliged to finish anything to prove you are all right. The written word is full of people keeping the places where their dead still are, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a yard at four in the afternoon as much as anywhere else on that farm.