Part 1:
“Your guys will work for me now.”
My little brother said that at my father’s retirement barbecue on Labor Day, with a can of beer in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other. He said it in front of 11 truck drivers and most of their wives.
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I’m Ernie. I was 37.
35 days later, my phone went off at 20 minutes to 5 in the morning. It was dark and 24° in Portage Lake, Maine, and frost had grown on every windshield in the yard.
It was Justin.
“Ernie,” he said, “here’s the thing.”
He always started with that. Every bad idea he ever had came in through that door.
“I need drivers. Just four. 2 weeks tops. Gang sent me a 30-day letter on Friday. If I can’t cover the loads, she’s gone for good. And dad’s about to lose his mind. You know these guys. Make a couple calls.”
His voice was thin. I’d never heard it like that. My brother had been sure of himself his whole life, mostly about things he knew nothing about.
“Make a couple calls,” he said again. “Please.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was standing in a gravel yard 17 mi north of my father’s house, holding a thermos lid of coffee. Around me, in the dark, diesel engines were warming up. You could see the exhaust going straight up in the cold and the amber clearance lights on the cabs, one truck after another in a long, crooked row.
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I counted them while he talked. I didn’t need to. I already knew the number.
What Justin didn’t know on that phone call was who was sitting in those cabs.
The story isn’t over. Type “LOVE” in the comments, and I’ll post the rest.
Part 2:
I’m glad you found your way here. I know there’s a lot to listen to, and you picked a log truck driver from the top of Maine. A man who talks mostly to a truck radio doesn’t always find the right words for that, but I mean it.
Whenever it suits you, leave a comment saying where you’re tuning in from and whether your maples have turned yet. Ours went red and gold the week all this happened.
To understand that phone call, you have to understand the Misho yard on Route 11 and the man who built it and the son he built it for.
My father is Felan Misho. He drove a pulp truck for 34 years. In 1991, he bought a used Mac with a loader on it for $19,000 and painted Misho trucking on the door himself. A little crooked.
He’s a big man with small hands. And when he doesn’t want to talk about something, he goes out and kicks the tires on whatever truck is closest. You can tell how bad a conversation went at our house by how many tires got kicked.
He had a saying: “Family doesn’t need paper.”
He said it about loans and handshakes and promises. He said it a lot. Looking back, he said it mostly when the paper would have helped somebody besides him.
My mother is Gileain. She worked 28 years on the line at the potato plant in Eastston, cutting bad spots out of potatoes on a moving belt, mostly the night shift. She smelled like frier oil every morning of my childhood, and I still think of it as a good smell.
She’s quiet. She watches for a long time. I wished she’d say what she was watching.
Then there’s Justin. Justin came four years after me. He came along when dad finally had enough money to buy a second truck. And dad always said that was luck. Justin was the lucky one. That got decided early.
He was a handsome boy and a quick talker. He could get a deadline moved and a girl to say yes on the same afternoon. He went to the University of Maine in Orino and got a business degree.
After that, he spent a while selling pickups on a car lot in Portland. Then he was going into real estate. Then he had a partner with a plan for a sporting camp. By the fall of 2024, Justin had been about to start something for roughly 11 years.
His wife is Tasha. She sells houses in Prescy, and she films everything. Birthdays, Christmas, a moose in the road, a plate of food before anybody’s allowed to eat it. If something happens near Tasha, it happens twice. Once in real life and once on her phone.
And then there’s me. I’m the one who was in the yard.
I started greasing dad’s trucks when I was 14. $4 an hour cash. Friday nights, I had a grease gun, a creeper with one bad wheel, and a radio that only got the station out of Prescy. I learned every fitting on every truck we owned.
I learned that a log truck takes a beating no other truck takes. The woods roads up here are gravel and frost heaves and wash outs. And in March, the whole country turns to pudding.
I got my commercial license at 18. You have to be 21 to haul across a state line, but in Maine, you can haul inside the state at 18. So that’s what I did. I hauled pulpwood and logs out of the woods west of Ashland through the checkpoint at 6 down to the mills.
I liked it right away. I like the dark at 4 in the morning and the first light coming up over the cut. I like chaining a load and feeling it settle. I like that a log truck can’t fake anything. Either the load is right or it isn’t.
But the thing I’m known for up here isn’t the driving, it’s the plates.
My grandmother was named Gilbert. She was a tiny woman who could letter a sign by hand so straight you’d swear a machine did it. In 1964, my grandfather ovided bought his first pulp truck, a used international, and grandma lettered the door. O Misho Ashland, Maine, red with a black shadow.
Then she did one more thing. She took a scrap of tin about the size of a license plate, painted it white, and lettered one word on it. Fernand, my father’s name. He was 5 years old.
She screwed it to the dash above the gauges. Grandpa asked her what it was for.
She said, “So, you remember who you’re driving home to?”
Grandpa drove 31 years with that piece of tin in front of him. He went through four trucks, and he moved it to everyone. When he died in 2003, Grandma gave it to me. Not to dad, to me.
I was 15. I didn’t ask why. I think now that she’d already seen who was going to be in the yard.
She taught me to letter that same winter at her kitchen table in Ashland with a squirrelhair liner brush and a can of sign enamel. She made me paint the alphabet on old cereal boxes until my hands stopped shaking.
“Pull the brush,” she said. “Don’t push it. You push a brush, it fights you.”
So, here’s what I do. Every driver who ever worked a truck I dispatched, I asked him the same question on his first day.
“Who are you driving home to?”
Then I cut a plate out of flat aluminum the size of a license plate. I paint it white. I letter the name he gave me in red with a black shadow the way grandma did. And I bolt it to his dash above the gauges.
Some guys said their wife’s name, some said a kid. One fella said his mother. One said his dog, a beagle named Pickle. And I painted that one just as straight as the rest.
It sounds soft. It isn’t.
A loaded log truck weighs 50 tons. Picture coming down a frost heave on gravel at 5 in the morning with a cliff of spruce behind your head. A name in front of you changes how you drive. I’ve watched it. Guys slow down for a name in a way they’ll never slow down for a sign.
The first plate I ever painted was in 2007 for a driver named Philip Olette. Everybody calls him Flip. He was 43 then, an owner operator with his own truck, and he just leased on with us.
I asked him the question. He squinted at me as if I’d been out in the sun too long. Then he said, “Louise.”
That plate has been on Flip’s dash for 18 years. He’s been through two trucks. He moved it every time. By the fall of 2025, I’d painted 43 of them.
When I started driving, Misho Trucking was three trucks. Dad, a fellow named Lionel Plord, and me. Dad did the dispatching off a yellow pad by the phone. If a mill called and nobody picked up, the load went to somebody else.
So, I started picking up.
I’d come in from a hall at 3:00 in the afternoon, eat, and then sit at mom’s kitchen table until 10 at night with the phone and the yellow pad. I called the logging contractors. I called the millards. I learned who cut where, whose landing was muddy, which scale house opened early.
I learned that if you say you’ll be at a landing at 6, you’d better be there at a quarter, too.
The first Christmas, Dad handed me an envelope with $1,800 in it, a bonus. I’d never held that much money. I sat in my truck and counted it twice.
On the 26th, Dad asked for it back.
Justin was 15. He wanted a snowmobile, a used Arctic cat that a man in Mapleton was selling for 2400. Dad had 600 set aside.
“Family bonus goes to the family,” he said. “You’ll get yours.”
I gave him the envelope.
Justin rode that sled for two winters and then left it out in the rain behind the shed, and it never started again. I know because I was the one who hauled it to the dump. I didn’t make a fuss about it. I was 19. I figured that’s what the oldest one does.
Over the next 6 years, we went from three trucks to seven. That wasn’t luck. That was the yellow pad and the phone and a lot of 4 a.m. starts.
I hired every driver we had. I painted every plate. When a driver’s kid was sick, I covered his run. When a truck broke down at a landing 40 m up the woods road, I went out with parts in the cab of my pickup, and we fixed it by flashlight.
By 2013, I was 25, and I’d saved $22,000. It was for a truck of my own. Every dollar of it came out of my pay. My pay was what dad called the family rate. That was about $2 an hour less than any other driver in the yard.
“You’re going to own the place someday,” he said. “Why pay yourself twice?”
That August, Dad waved me into the kitchen and pointed at a chair. Justin had spent 2 years selling phones at the mall in Prescy, and now he decided to go to the business school in Oro. After all, the money from Grandma’s estate had run out.
There was a tire bill at the shop in Prescy for $11,000, and the insurance was due.
“I need to borrow your truck money,” Dad said. “Just till spring. Family doesn’t need paper.”
I asked him how much.
“All of it,” he said.
I loaned it to him. I watched him write the checks. Most of it went to Orino.
Spring came. Then another one. When I asked about it, Dad went out and kicked a tire on the Mac. The next year, I asked again.
He said, “You live in my house, you eat at my table, and you’re asking me for money?”
I was paying him 300 a month for my room at the time. I had the receipts. I didn’t bring them up.
I never got that 22,000 back, but I learned something from it, and I learned it for good.
The next Monday, I drove 23 m down Route 163 to Prescy and put my pay in a bank no Mishode had ever walked into. At the drugstore next door, I bought a hardback daybook with a red cloth spine, the same kind the scale houses keep.
I started writing everything down. What I earned, what I loaned, what I was promised, and who said it.
The next year was the big one. There’s a stud mill in Msardis, 10 mi south of Ashland on Route 11, called Gon Lumber. They saw spruce and fur into 2x4s. In 2014, they needed a trucking outfit that could bring them 40 loads a week, every week, rain or mud. Two bigger outfits from down by Milanino wanted it.
I drove down there at 5 in the morning, 5 days in a row, and stood outside the scale house until the wood buyer came in. Her name was Mon’nique Gong. She was the founder’s granddaughter, about my age, a forester with a degree from Orino and steel toes.
On the fifth morning, she said, “What do you want?”
I said, “I want to show you a week of loads.”
I brought her a typed sheet: every truck we had, every driver, how many miles each one had hauled the year before, and how many loads we’d lost to breakdowns. Four out of about 3,000.
She looked it over in the cold. Then she said, “Your father’s company?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who’s going to answer the phone when something goes wrong?”
“Me,” I said.
We got the contract, 40 loads a week at a set rate per ton with a clause either side could use to walk away on 30 days notice. That contract carried Micho trucking for the next 11 years. It’s the reason we went from seven trucks to 12.
The night we signed it, Dad poured two glasses of Canadian whiskey at the kitchen table and clapped me on the back.
“A third of the company,” he said. “It’s yours when the papers get done.”
I wrote that in the red day book the same night. The date, the words, the glass of whiskey.
The papers never got done.
I married Nicole in 2018. She teaches fourth grade in Ashland. The first afternoon she visited the yard, she watched me bolt a plate to a new driver’s dash, and she asked who it was for. I told her.
She didn’t smile at it like a joke. She asked if she could watch me paint the next one.
When I told her about the 22,000 and the third of the company, she said three words.
“Write it down.”
“I did,” I said.
She smiled. “And you’re smarter than you look.”
But I’d already done one more thing 2 years before I met her. In 2016, a truck of my own finally came along. A 2009 Kenworth T800 with a self-loader behind the cab. $74,500.
I put 15,000 down from the Prescy account and borrowed the rest in my own name. I registered it under my own number with the state and the federal people under a name I picked myself, Fish River Hauling.
The Fish River runs north out of Portage Lake through the country where grandpa cut his first wood.
Then I leased my truck onto dad’s company like any owner operator. I wrote up a lease, same one I’d written for every owner operator we had. Either side could end it on 30 days written notice or right away if both sides agreed in writing.
Dad put his name on it across the hood of my Kenworth without looking at it.
“Family doesn’t need paper,” he said.
“Then it won’t hurt to have one,” I said.
Nobody in my family ever asked what Fish River hauling meant. It was right there on my door for 9 years. Justin once called it my little hobby name.
The last truck payment went out in 2021.
We had Lucy in 2020. I put her name on a plate the week she was born, and I bolted it to my own dash right under grandma’s piece of tin that said Fernand.
In 2022, Gon Lumber sent us a check for $9,600. It was a safe hauling bonus. 3 years, 12 drivers, not one accident, not one load dumped, not one ticket for weight.
Mon’nique wrote a letter with it. She said the money was for the drivers, $800 a man.
Dad deposited it in the company account. 2 weeks later, Justin’s partner needed a deposit to hold an old sporting camp on Moose Head Lake, and Dad wrote the check.
I looked at the bank statement. I didn’t have to guess.
I asked Dad about the driver’s money.
He said, “The drivers don’t need to know about it.”
“M’nique sent them a letter,” I said. “They’ll know.”
He went out and kicked a tire.
That week, I wrote 12 checks for $800 each out of my own account in Prescy. $9,600. I handed them out at the fuel island with Mon’nique’s letter and didn’t say where the money came from.
Most of them figured it out anyway. Flip folded his check into his shirt pocket and stared at me for a good while and never said a word.
That went in the red day book, too. Then I closed the book and went to work.
In the fall of 2024, Justin came home. The sporting camp hadn’t happened. The partner had moved to Florida. Justin and Tasha bought a big new house outside Prescy with a threecar garage.
Dad gave Justin a title, operations manager, and a salary of $85,000 a year.
I was doing the dispatching, the hiring, the contract, and driving my own truck 4 days a week. For the dispatching, I made $58,000. I know exactly because I’d been the one cutting the checks.
Justin’s first big idea came in February.
“Here’s the thing,” he said at Sunday dinner. “Image. Mills want to see new iron. We roll in with six new trucks. We look like a real outfit.”
Our company trucks were older Max, but they were good. I’d kept them up myself. I said they had five more years in them. Easy.
“Ernie thinks small,” Justin said.
Tasha filmed him saying it.
In March, Dad traded in our six Macs and signed for six 2-year-old Western Stars from a dealer in Bangor. $780,000 financed, $15,600 a month.
The bank wanted a personal guarantee, so Dad put up the house and the 120 acres on Route 11. I found out from the bank’s paperwork on the dispatch desk.
Nobody told me.
Dad’s retirement barbecue was on Labor Day, the 1st of September. 68°, a high blue sky, the black flies finally gone. He had it in the yard on Route 11 between the shop and the fuel tank.
Every driver and his family was invited. Mom made three pans of baked beans and a tub of potato salad. Tasha hung a vinyl banner across the shop door that said, “Congratulations, Fernand,” with a picture of a truck on it that wasn’t ours.
The six western stars were lined up behind the grill, washed and shining. Dad had them parked there on purpose.
I spent most of the afternoon at the picnic tables with the drivers. Flick was there with Louise. She was wearing a knit hat in September because she’d started chemo in Prescy in July, and her hair was coming out.
Mike Seir was there with his wife, who was 7 months along with their first. Lionel Plurard had driven for dad since 1999. He sat in a lawn chair and told the same story about the winter of 1998 that he tells every year.
Nicole was beside me. Lucy was under the table feeding a potato chip to somebody’s dog.
Around 4, Dad rang a fork against his beer can. He thanked the crowd. He said 34 years on the road was enough for any man. He said he was proud of what he’d built.
Then he said, “I want you all to meet the new president of Misho Trucking.”
For a second, I honestly believed my name was coming next. I don’t know why. 11 years after a glass of Canadian whiskey, some part of me still thought he might.
“My son, Justin,” he said.
People clapped the way people clap at a barbecue. Justin stepped up next to the grill. Tasha was filming.
Dad said he’d signed the company over to Justin on Friday at the lawyer’s office in Prescy. All of it, the trucks, the contracts, the name on the door.
Then he looked over at me.
“Ernie can keep driving, of course,” he said. “Ernie’s the best driver we’ve got.”
It got quiet at the picnic tables. Not all at once. One table at a time, like a wind going through tall grass.
I stood up. I didn’t raise my voice.
“Dad,” I said, “back in 2014, you told me a third of the company was mine. When the papers got done.”
Dad looked at the grill.
“That was talk,” he said. “That was whiskey talk.”
Then Justin did what Justin does. He tried to make it a joke. He waved the tongs at me and grinned. And he said the thing he’d been wanting to say since he was 15.
“Come on, Ernie. Don’t make it weird. Your guys will work for me now.”
He said it toward the picnic tables, toward Flip and Louise in her knit hat, toward Mike and his wife, toward Lionel in his lawn chair.
I looked at Justin for a while. Then I said, “They were never mine to give, Justin.”
That was all I said. I sat back down and finished my plate of beans.
Dad didn’t sit down. He stood there getting red the way he does. And then he walked over to my table in front of everybody.
He said, “If you’re going to sulk at my party, you can take your truck and go tonight.”
I wiped my hands on a napkin. I took a clean paper plate off the stack. I got a pen out of my shirt pocket.
On that paper plate, I wrote, “The lease between Misho Trucking and Fish River Hauling ends today, the 1st of September, by agreement of both sides.”
I signed it. I dated it. I held it out to my father with the pen.
He stared at the plate, then at the crowd staring at him. Then he grabbed the pen and signed it hard enough to tear the plate a little at the end of his name.
I folded the plate once and tucked it behind my pen. Nicole picked up Lucy. We said goodbye to mom, who had a dish towel pressed against her mouth.
Then I walked across the yard to my Kenworth. I unbolted nothing. Every plate in every truck belonged to the man who drove it. Mine belonged to me.
I climbed up, started her, and let the air build. In the side mirror, I could see Tasha still filming.
I didn’t have a yard to go to. I had a truck, a paid off truck, a paper plate, and the account in Presley with about $41,000 in it.
I drove north on Route 11 because I didn’t want to drive past the barbecue going south.
17 mi up at Portage Lake, there’s a yard with a steel shop and a gray farmhouse. The porch light was on. That was Orurel Ducet’s place.
Orel was 79. He’d run a logging crew out of Portage for 40 years, and from about 2010 on, we’d hauled his wood. I’d painted a plate for every one of his trucks.
Jiselle, his wife, had made me a pot of pea soup the first winter I hauled for them, and she’d made one every winter since.
Ourel sold his crew in 2019 when his knees gave out. But he couldn’t stand to sell his three old trucks to a dealer in Bangor. So they sat in his shop under a tarp, greased and plugged in like he was waiting for something.
He was on the porch when I pulled in. Somebody at the barbecue had already called him. Up here, news goes faster than trucks.
He came down the steps slow and stood by my door.
“Park it by the shop,” he said. “Jisselle’s got soup on. You want to tell me about it or you want to eat?”
“Eat,” I said.
“Good,” said Arel. “I’m too old to listen to a man and eat at the same time.”
That night, after Nicole and Lucy had gone home to Ashland in the car, I sat in my truck in Arel’s yard and did one thing.
I sent a text to all 12 drivers at Misho Trucking. The same text to every man.
“Don’t quit on my account. Give Justin a fair shot. If you ever do leave, give him proper notice. Thank you for 18 good years, Ernie.”
Then I turned off my phone and slept in the sleeper.
The first two weeks, I hauled for Arell’s nephew, who had a small crew cutting near Square Lake. It wasn’t much. I took what I could get.
Arel wouldn’t take rent for the yard.
“Grease my trucks once a month,” he said. “That’s rent.”
Here’s what happened at me show trucking while I was gone. I didn’t see it. I heard it a piece at a time from men who showed up in Arel’s yard.
On the 3rd of September, Justin called a meeting in the shop. He announced a new pay plan. Company drivers had been getting 28% of what their truck earned. Now it was 24.
Owner operators had been getting 88% of the load. Now it was 82. And he’d be marking up the fuel card.
“Industry standard,” he said.
Tasha had told him that.
On the 5th, he told Flip he’d be docked 2 days pay for missing work. Flip had missed two days because he’d driven Louise to the cancer center in Prescle for her treatments. He’d cleared it with me in July.
On the 8th, Justin put out a memo. All personal items were to come off company dashboards.
“Professional image,” it said. “Company trucks aren’t scrapbooks.”
He’d ordered new decals with a logo Tasha’s cousin designed.
That one got them.
Lionel Plord was the first man to show up at Orel’s yard. 10:00 in the morning on the 10th of September. He walked over from his pickup, holding his plate in both hands, a little bent at one corner where he’d pried it off.
It said agath. That was his late wife. I’d painted it in 2007, 2 years after she died, and he’d asked for her name without even thinking.
“Justin told me to take it off,” Lionel said. “So, I took it off. Then, I figured if she’s not going in that truck, I’m not either.”
I told him he should go back and talk to Justin. I meant it.
“I already gave him my notice,” Lionel said. “Two weeks, like you said. I’m not asking you for a job, Ernie. I’m asking if you know anybody hiring.”
I didn’t have a truck for him.
Orel was standing behind me, listening, leaning on his cane.
“I do,” Orrell said.
He pointed his cane at the shop.
“Three of them, $200 a month each, and keep them greased. I’m not giving anything away. I’m too cheap.”
That was how it went. Not all at once, one at a time, each on his own.
Mike Seir came on the 12th, baby due in November, and four points off his pay was about $300 a week.
“I can’t feed a kid on Justin’s image,” he said.
Steve Le came the same afternoon. He didn’t give a reason. He just held up his plate. It said Sophie, his daughter.
The owner operators came slower because their leases said 30 days, and every one of them gave the 30 days.
Flip gave his on the 5th, the afternoon Justin docked him. Mark Tero gave his on the 6th, the day he saw the fuel markup on his settlement sheet. The other four gave theirs the same day he did.
They kept hauling for Justin, honest, every load, until their days ran out. I asked them to.
I didn’t call anybody. I want that understood. I didn’t have to.
Meanwhile, I had a problem I’d never had in my life. I had men and trucks and no wood.
So, I did the only thing I know how to do. I got up at 4 and drove to landings. I talked to every logging contractor between Portage and Fort Kent. A crew cutting on the Fish River needed two trucks. A crew near Eagle Lake needed one.
A real made calls to men he’d cut wood with for 40 years. And those men made calls.
By the 20th of September, Fish River Hauling had work for six trucks, and it was getting closer to 9 every day.
The messages started coming the second week.
Justin, on the 14th: “You put them up to this.”
I wrote back, “No.”
Justin, on the 16th: “Tell Flip to come back. He listens to you.”
I wrote, “Pay him, right?”
Dad, on the 19th: “Your mother hasn’t slept in a week. Come home and fix this.”
I wrote, “I’m working.”
Tasha posted the barbecue video. Somebody showed it to me. She’d cut it off right after Justin’s line, before mine, with a caption about haters.
It got about 400 views, and most of the comments were from driver’s wives. I won’t repeat what they said.
On the 21st, a Sunday, my mother drove up to Portage Lake by herself. She’d never been to Arell’s place. She parked her Buick by the shop, got out with a casserole dish wrapped in a towel, and stood there looking at the trucks.
Jiselle went out and brought her inside like they’d known each other 40 years, which it turned out they sort of had. They’d been in the same confirmation class at St. Marks in Ashland.
Mom sat at Jiselle’s table and didn’t touch her coffee. Then she said what she’d driven up to say.
“In August,” Mom said, “Justin told your father you were leaving. He said you were starting your own company and taking all the drivers with you. He said he’d heard it from one of the men. He said if dad didn’t sign the company over right away, you’d walk with everything and the bank would take the house.”
I just looked at her.
“Your father believed him,” she said. “Because of the name on your truck, Fish River Hauling. Justin said that was proof. He said you’d been planning it for years.”
“I put that name on the door in 2016,” I said. “Because dad took my truck money.”
“I know,” she said. “I told him that. He didn’t want to hear it.”
Then she told me the rest. When dad bought the Six Western Stars, the bank had asked for a management plan. Justin wrote it. It listed Justin as the man in charge, and it listed 12 experienced drivers by name as the company’s main asset.
The bank had loaned $780,000 partly on that sheet of paper.
12 men Justin had never hired, never dispatched, and had just told in front of their wives that they belonged to him.
“There’s 712,000 left on those trucks,” Mom said. “15,600 a month, and three of them are sitting in the yard with nobody to drive them.”
Two empty bolt holes on every dash.
I asked her why she was telling me this. She sat with her hands around the cup.
Finally, she said, “Because your grandmother gave you that piece of tin and not your father. I used to think she was being mean to him. I don’t think that anymore.”
She left the casserole. It was ham and potatoes. It was very good.
9 days later, on the 30th, Monnique Gon called me.
“Misho ran 17 loads to my yard last week,” she said. “I need 40. I’ve got a saw line standing still 2 days a week. I’m going to use the 30-day clause. Can you haul for me?”
I told her the truth.
“Give Justin till the end of the month,” I said. “Give him a real chance. If he can’t do it by then, call me back.”
“Ernie,” she said. “It’s the 30th.”
“Then give him till Friday.”
She laughed. Not a nice laugh, but not at me.
“You miss shows,” she said. “Fine, Friday.”
Friday came. Micho ran 14 loads that week.
Mon’nique sent Justin the letter. 30 days.
She called and asked me to meet her at Orel’s yard at 6:00 on Monday morning to sign. She said she wanted to see the truck’s roll before she put her name on anything.
Which brings me back to that phone call and 20 minutes to 5 and 24°.
“Make a couple calls,” Justin said. “Please, just four guys.”
I looked down the row of trucks idling in the dark. Mine, three of Arell’s old Kenworths with Lionel, Mike, and Steve in them, and six owner operators who had worked out their 30 days to the hour.
Flip, Mark, four more good men. 10 trucks, counting mine. Nine of his 12 drivers.
“Justin,” I said, “they’re not mine to lend.”
He hung up.
At a quarter after 5, headlights swung into the yard. Dad’s Silverado. It stopped crooked by the shop. Dad climbed down from behind the wheel, and Justin came around from the passenger door.
Justin was wearing a Misho trucking jacket with the new logo on it. It still had the fold creases.
Dad walked right past me. He walked down the row of trucks, looking up at every cab. He got to Flip’s truck and stopped. Flip rolled his window down.
Dad studied him, then Lionel, two trucks over, and then at Mike Seir, who couldn’t hold his eyes. Then dad turned around and came back to me.
“You stole my drivers,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Every one of these men was on my payroll a month ago.”
“Nine of them were,” I said. “Three are still on it. Two of those are good men. I hope you keep them.”
Justin stepped in.
“Here’s the thing,” he said.
And for once, he didn’t get any further because dad held up a hand.
“That gang contract is my company’s,” Dad said. “I’ll have the lawyer on you by noon. Tasha’s got you on video. You planned this for years. Fish River Hauling. That name’s been on your door for 9 years.”
“Since the year you borrowed my truck money, Dad,” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
Then Flip climbed down from his cab. He’s 61, and his knees make him take his time. He walked over in his green wool coat, and he held out his phone to my father.
“Fernand,” Flip said, “look at what your son sent us the night of your party.”
Dad didn’t want to take it. He took it.
It was my text.
“Don’t quit on my account. Give Justin a fair shot. Give him proper notice.”
“He sent the same to every one of us,” Flip said. “I gave your boy my 30 days. I hauled everyone. Then he docked me 2 days for taking Louise to chemo.”
Mike Seir had climbed down by then, too.
“24%,” he said, “with a baby coming in 6 weeks.”
Lionel stayed in his cab. He just held up his plate against the windshield where dad could see it.
Agath. Dad had been at her funeral.
Justin said, “I can fix the pay.”
“You can”—Flip—“but you said we were his guys, like a set of tires. We heard you.”
That’s when the second set of headlights came in. A green Gon lumber pickup. Monique Gon got out with a clipboard and a travel mug, saw my father, and stopped.
“Ferno,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“He’s poaching my contract, Monique.”
She looked at him, then at Justin, then at me. Then she said it in a flat voice. The way a forester tells you how many cords are on a lot.
“Your company ran 17 loads to my yard the last week of September and 14 last week. I need 40. My contract has a 30-day out, and I used it. Ernie didn’t call me. I called him, and he told me to give your son till the end of the month. Then he told me to give him till Friday. I did both.”
Nobody said anything. A truck down the line ticked its fan on. Justin looked at the ground. Tasha wasn’t there to film it.
Dad’s voice came out different then. Lower.
“Then come back,” he said. “Run it. I’ll sign the third over. I’ll sign half today.”
“No,” I said.
“Then send me five of them just till the trucks are paid down.”
“Ask them,” I said.
He looked down the row. Nobody moved.
Then, one by one, the drivers climbed back up into their cabs. Flip went last. He gave my father a nod, not an unkind one, and shut his door.
“The bank will take the house,” Dad said. “712,000, Ernie.”
“I know the number, Dad,” I said. “Sell the trucks you can’t drive before the bank does it for you.”
He stood there. Then he did something I didn’t expect.
He didn’t kick a tire.
He walked to my Kenworth, which was idling with the door open, and he looked up into the cab. Above the gauges, there were two plates, Lucy in red, and over it a piece of white tin chipped at the corners, lettered in Grandma’s hand 61 years ago.
Fernand.
He stood at the step a good while, not a word. Then he turned around, climbed into the Silverado beside Justin, and they drove south.
Mon’nique signed at 6:05. At 6:20, 10 trucks pulled out of Orel’s yard, one after another, and turned onto Route 11.
You stuck it out through every mile of that, and I’m grateful. Truly, plenty of folks would have quit on me at the barbecue.
Could I trouble you for a single word down below? Somebody reading them is the one who held everything together while somebody else took the boughs. Leave them this word, binder.
On a log truck, the binder is the thing that keeps the chain tight so the load doesn’t shift. Nobody looks at it. Everybody needs it.
Here’s how the year shook out for all of us.
Dad sold three of the Western Stars to a dealer in Bangor in November. The used truck market was soft, and he came out $64,000 short of what he owed on them. He sold the back 80 acres of the land on Route 11 to a man from Caribou to cover it.
He kept the house.
He’s retired now for real. Mom says he walks out to the yard every morning and looks at the trucks and doesn’t kick anything.
He sent me one text on Christmas Eve.
“Merry Christmas to you and the girls.”
I wrote back, “Same to you, Dad.”
That’s where it sits. There’s no Sunday dinner. I don’t go to the house. Some doors you can leave unlocked without walking through them.
Mom comes up to portage most Saturdays. She and Jisselle make ps on the griddle, the buckwheat pancakes my grandmother used to make, and the drivers eat them standing up in the shop.
Mom sits in the dispatch office some mornings and answers the phone. She’s got a better phone voice than me.
Justin still runs Micho Trucking. Three trucks, three drivers, and one of the drivers is him. He hauls for a crew out of Msardis. He put the payback to 28%.
I hear he learned to chain a load. I hear he’s slow at it and careful. And slow and careful is how you want it.
He and Tasha sold the house with the threecar garage in August.
His boy Benois rode up to Orurel’s yard with my mother on a Saturday. He’s 11. He stood by the shop door, shy as a fawn, and asked me if I’d paint a plate for his dad’s truck.
I asked him what name he wanted on it.
He said, “Mine.”
So, I painted Benois in red with a black shadow, the way grandma taught me. Benois watched me pull the brush.
I drove it down to Ashland and handed it to Justin in his yard, and he bolted it on his dash himself.
He texted me that night.
“Thanks.”
I wrote, “Drive slow.”
Fish River Hauling runs 11 trucks now. Mike Sears’s daughter was born on the 9th of November, and I painted her plate in the hospital parking lot in Prescy with the dome light on.
Louise finished her treatments in the spring. Her hair came back curly, and Flip says he’s not sure he likes it, and she says he can lump it.
Orel turned 80 in March. I bought his three old trucks from him at a price he named himself, and he still argues that it was too much.
He sits in the dispatch office in the mornings with his cane across his knees. And when a truck pulls out, he lifts two fingers off the cane.
Every truck. Every morning.
Last Sunday night at our kitchen table in Ashland, I painted plate number 52. A new driver, 19 years old from Msardis.
When I asked him who he was driving home to, he thought about it a long time and said, “My grandmother, her name is Germaine.”
Then he said, “No, wait. Is that weird?”
I told him my grandmother painted the first one.
Lucy held the jar of red for me. She’s six now. She held it with both hands and didn’t spill a drop.
When I pulled the last stroke of the last letter, she said, “Pull. Don’t push.”
Because she’s heard me say it a hundred times.
A year ago on Labor Day, my brother told me my guys would work for him now.
They never worked for him, Justin. They never worked for me either.
They work for the names on their dashboards.
