Chapter 2 - The Soft Brake Pedal
The warning signs had been there since August, but like every other piece of machinery on the Hensley farm, I treated the 1998 Ford F-250 as something that could be coaxed through one more season with a bit of wire and some cussing.
The brake pedal had started feeling spongy around the time we finished cutting the alfalfa. You'd press it down, and it would yield soft and springy under your boot, catching only when the pad was two inches from the floorboard.
"Needs a master cylinder," Jim at the NAPA store in town had told me back in July when I bought three bottles of brake fluid. "Or you've got a rusted line behind the rear axle, Walter. Those late-nineties Fords are famous for rotting out right where the frame dips."
"It's just air in the lines," I told him, throwing a twenty-dollar bill onto the glass counter. "I'll bleed 'em out once the corn comes off."
"Don't play around with brakes, Walter," Jim said, his eyebrows pulling together under his greasy ballcap. "You've got that steep grade down by Sugar Creek bridge. If that line blows when you've got a load of feed in the bed..."
"I've been driving this county since before you were in diapers, Jimmy," I said, carrying the fluid bottles out to the truck. "I know how to double-pump a pedal."
Stubbornness. That's what I called it.
The truth was worse: I didn't care enough to fix it. When you're seventy-two years old and the house behind you is empty every time you turn the key in the front door, maintenance feels like an exercise in vanity. Why put four hundred dollars' worth of hydraulic lines into an old truck when you aren't sure you care about reaching the other side of winter anyway?
On the third Tuesday of November, the sky was the color of a wet slate shingle. A cold, greasy mist was falling, turning the clay lanes between the corn stubble into grease.
I had loaded six two-hundred-pound bags of cattle mineral into the bed of the Ford, along with three bales of straw for Buster's winter box on the porch. Buster was sitting on the split-vinyl passenger seat, his paws tucked neatly under his chest, watching the windshield wipers scrape across the glass with a slow thump-swish, thump-swish.
"We'll get this feed down to the bottom pasture," I told him, shifting the truck into low gear as we turned onto the dirt track that led down toward Sugar Creek. "Then we'll go home, light the stove, and see if there's any of that pork stew left in the freezer."
Buster turned his head and gave me a quiet mew—the small, soft sound he saved only for when we were alone in the cab.
The track down to the creek dropped about eighty feet over a quarter-mile stretch, curving sharply to the left before hitting the narrow iron bridge built by the WPA in 1938. The rain had washed out the shoulder, leaving deep, water-filled ruts on either side of the gravel.
I tapped the brake pedal to slow our descent.
Spongy.
I pumped it once. It went further down.
I pumped it a second time, hard, putting the full weight of my bad hip into the stroke.
There was a sharp, wet pop from beneath the truck frame—a sound like a rubber band snapping inside a bucket of lard.
The pedal slammed flat against the floorboards. No resistance. Nothing.
"Dammit!" I yelled, my hands tightening on the steering wheel as the heavy truck accelerated down the muddy grade, propelled by twelve hundred pounds of mineral bags in the back.
The F-250 gathered speed—thirty miles an hour, forty, sliding sideways in the slick red clay.
"Hold on!" I screamed, reaching my right arm across the cab to pin Buster against the seat back, just like I used to do for my daughter when she was small.
Ahead of us, the narrow wooden deck of Sugar Creek bridge was coming up fast. To the right was the iron girder; to the left was thirty feet of open air above a rock-choked ravine.
I pulled the emergency brake lever with my left hand. The rear wheels locked up instantly, but on the wet clay, the tires had no more grip than two grease rags. The truck spun sideways, the back end swinging out toward the valley.
The driver's side front fender smashed into the bridge girder with a deafening screech of tearing metal and shattering glass. The force of the impact whipped the truck back around, throwing us off the gravel embankment and down into the creek bed below.
We hit the boulders bottom-first.
The steering wheel smashed into my chest with the force of a sledgehammer, cracking three ribs and driving the air out of my lungs in a bloody spray. My head hit the side window, shattering the glass, and for a long, black moment, the world went completely dark.
When I came to, the horn was blowing—a continuous, screaming blare that echoed off the concrete bridge abutments.
Smoke was pouring out from under the twisted hood, smelling of scorched oil and boiled antifreeze. My left leg was pinned beneath the crushed dashboard, the steel crumpled tight against my shin.
"Buster..." I rasped, my throat choked with steam and copper-tasting blood. "Buster..."
He wasn't on the seat.
I looked down into the footwell.
The battery box from the mineral trailer had broke loose, smashing through the back window and crumpling the passenger floorboard like a tin can.
Buster was lying caught under the bent iron frame of the passenger seat. His body was twisted at an impossible angle, his golden coat soaked in green radiator fluid and dark, thick blood coming from his ears.
He wasn't moving.
His head was resting against the sharp, jagged edge of the broken heater box. His yellow eyes were half-open, clouded and fixed, staring at nothing.
"No," I choked out, a raw, ragged sound tearing from my chest. "No, no, no..."
I clawed at the crumpled metal of the dashboard, ignoring the blinding agony in my ribs and the hot blood dripping from my scalp into my eyes. I pulled until the skin tore off my knuckles, reaching down into the wreckage until my fingers touched his cold, wet fur.
He didn't move. He didn't breathe.
I pulled his limp, heavy weight out from under the iron frame, dragging him up onto my lap. His head dropped back like a sack of wet sand.
"Buster," I sobbed, pressing my forehead against his sticky, blood-soaked nose. "Don't you die. Don't you dare die on me, you stubborn old bastard..."
May you like
Out on the county road, three hundred yards up the hill, I heard the faint, distant sound of an engine slowing down—somebody had seen the tire tracks leading off the road into the ravine.
I sat there in the smoking wreck, trapped under the iron, cradling the broken, lifeless body of the cat who had kept me from shooting myself in an empty farmhouse, and I screamed into the rain until my lungs bled.
