“Six million, three hundred thousand dollars, Brad,” I said, and I set the sponge down on the hay bale beside the paper. “That is what I received nine weeks ago for the company. Every truck, every container, every employee.” Out in the field, a Harley idled and then went silent. “The black Peterbilt behind the barn of your son is unit twenty two. It is on line twenty two of that schedule, and it belongs to the buyer. Tanner is selling it for one hundred forty eight thousand dollars, along with thirty containers and a forklift. None of them were his to take.”
Brad did not answer. He stood on the hay bale with the microphone hanging from his hand like a dead bird, and the whole barn waited. Tanner, thirty years old and as broad as a door, stared at his boots. “Dad, I can explain,” he said. “Rusty told me you came on Saturday night with a story about me okaying it,” I said. “You told him I was selling off before the bank got it. There is no bank, Tanner. There was only a man who taught you how to set a container on a hillside without tipping it.” His chin trembled. “I wanted to be somebody,” he whispered. “You already were,” I said.
Lori walked across the barn, her boots loud on the plank floor, and took my arm. She is a quiet woman, but I have never heard her voice carry so far. “Brad,” she said, “for thirty three years you have called my husband the box boy in front of your friends, your customers and your children. Say his name.” A hundred bikers stood in the barn with their beers halfway to their mouths. Brad stepped down off the hay bale. He was shaking. “Dale Ostrander,” he said, “I am sorry. You are the best man I know, and I never once told you.” Nobody moved.
A single sheet of paper laid on a hay bale gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the barn in Spearfish.
I gave Tanner my terms there in the barn, with the band silent and the hay dust floating in the light. The truck, the thirty containers and the forklift would be back at my yard on Highway 85 by noon on Monday. Kjelstad Container Company would be closed, and the cardboard sign burned. He would tell the lawyers of the buyer the whole truth. If he did all of it, I would not press charges, and I would ask the company to keep him on as a driver at the same pay, because he could still drop a container on a hillside without tipping it.
On Monday, I stood at the gate of my yard at dawn. The forklift came first, carried on a trailer by the neighbor of Tanner. The containers arrived in groups of five, stacked on three flatbeds. And at eleven, the black Peterbilt rolled up the gravel drive, its tilt bed lowered, its windshield clear of the cardboard sign. Rusty, my yard manager, walked around it twice and checked the hydraulics. Then he looked at me and said, “Boss, it is all here. Even the little number twenty two on the deck.” I put my palm on the warm black hood and let out a breath I had been holding since Saturday.
A rider the size of a refrigerator walked up to me in the barn, a man everyone called Moose, wearing a leather vest covered in patches. I braced myself. Instead, he took off his cap and held out his hand. “Mr. Ostrander, my cousin rented one of your containers when his house burned in the Black Hills,” he said. “You gave him three months free. Nobody ever told us your name.” I had forgotten the family. A dozen other bikers drifted over, one by one, and each had a story about a container delivered at a bad time. I had never kept count, and they had.
Lori and I drove home that night in silence, down Spearfish Canyon with the windows open and the creek loud beside the road. At the kitchen table, she poured two glasses of milk, the way she did on our wedding night, and she took my hand. “Dale, I always knew,” she said. “I did not know the number, but I knew what you were. I only wish I had said something sooner to my brother.” I told her it was all right. She shook her head. “It was not,” she said. “But it will be.” We sat there until the stars came out over the Black Hills.
The money consequences were fair. Tanner repaid the buyer for the fuel, the hauling and a cracked hydraulic hose, about nine thousand dollars, and he agreed to drive without overtime for a year. Brad sold two motorcycles and a lake cabin to pay the legal bills of his son, and he refused to let me contribute. When I insisted on at least buying the beer, he shook his head, took a ten dollar bill from his wallet and pressed it into my palm. “The first rule of the box boy,” he said, “is that the box boy gets paid.” I framed the bill.
In the name of my mother, Elsie, who passed fifteen years ago and who once opened her barn to three families that had lost everything in a wildfire, I started the Elsie Fund. It supplies free storage containers, delivery and a month of rent to families in Lawrence County whose homes have been damaged by fire or flood. In the first season, we reached twenty six households. A rancher in his sixties, whose barn had burned to the ground, stood in front of the first container we delivered, put his hand on the steel, and said quietly, “Somebody remembered us.”
The following August, at the rally party in Spearfish, I parked my truck by the road and walked up the long drive. In the driveway, Brad stood in an apron, with a bucket and a sponge, washing the motorcycles of his own guests. When he saw me, he lifted the sponge in a salute. “Dale,” he called, “you wash the first one. I will take the other fourteen.” I laughed, and I took the sponge, and I washed one Harley with great care. When I finished, Brad handed me a twenty and a ten, and a cold beer, and said, “Thirty bucks. And not one missed spot.”
