He did not have to be there. Nora had told him that, too. "The auction house will handle it, Grandpa. They'll wire the money. You don't need to sit there all day in that sale barn breathing dust." But he had wanted to. He had been raising cattle on that land since 1968, when he and June had put a down payment on the first hundred and sixty acres with money they had saved for six years in a coffee can, and he was not going to let the last of them go through a ring without at least one person in the stands who knew their names.
He sat on the hard wooden bleachers of the sale barn for three hours in the smell of manure and sawdust and diesel, his feed-store cap pulled low, his arms folded across the front of his quilted canvas vest. He watched every lot. He did not bid on anything and he did not talk to anybody. When the last of his calves went through — a long-legged red heifer that June would have called Dolly, because June had called every red heifer Dolly for forty years — he stood up, nodded once to the auctioneer, who nodded back, and walked out into the wind.
His boots were caked in the sale-barn dirt. There was a smear of something on the knee of his jeans. His vest, which he had owned for longer than Nora had been alive, had a tear at one pocket that June had mended with green thread, the only green thread in the house, and a pale salt line across the back from forty summers of sweat. He looked down at himself in the gravel lot of the sale barn, in the wind, and brushed some of the dust off the front of the vest with the back of his hand, and then gave up.
Nora had told him to change before he went to the dealership.
"You're going to walk into a Cadillac store," she had said on the phone last night, "and spend more money than most people in this county will see in their lives. Wear the blue shirt. Wear the boots I got you for Christmas. Wear anything that doesn't have cow on it. Or at least call ahead. Call Mr. Harmon and tell him you're coming. Let them get ready."
"Why would I call ahead?"
"So they know who you are!"
"Why does it matter who I am? I'm a man who wants to buy some cars."
"Grandpa." She had sighed in that way she had, which was exactly June's sigh, so exactly that it still sometimes caught him under the ribs. "You know what I mean. You know how people are. You walk in there looking like you just came from the sale barn —"
"I will have just come from the sale barn."
"— and they're going to look at you and decide you're nobody. And then you're going to get that look on your face. And then something's going to happen."
"Nothing's going to happen."
"Something always happens when you get that look."
He had not answered that, because she was right.
* * *
He drove south from Woodward with the envelope on the passenger seat beside him.
Somewhere around Mooreland he pulled off onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway, in the middle of nothing, in the middle of the wheat, and turned the engine off and sat there with the wind rocking the truck on its springs. Then he picked up the envelope and took the rubber band off and opened it.
On top, in a plain white bank envelope of its own, there was a cashier's check drawn on the First National Bank of Woodward, made out to Ridgeline Cadillac, in an amount that he had written down on a piece of paper and checked with Nora three times, because he did not altogether trust himself with numbers that had that many zeroes in them. Under it was a typed list of twenty names and twenty addresses. Under that was a photograph.
The photograph was old, square, with a white border, the colors gone soft and orange the way colors in old photographs go. It showed twenty-one people standing in a ragged line in front of a long metal building with a sign on the roof that said WHITCOMB FREIGHT LINES — ENID, OKLA. Behind them, a row of tractor-trailers, eighteen-wheelers, their cabs painted a deep green with a white W on the door. The people were men, mostly, with two women at the end of the row, all of them in jeans and work shirts and boots, squinting into the sun. A few were smiling. Most were not. They had the faces of people who had not slept much in a while. In the middle of the row, a little taller than the men on either side of him, there was a black-haired man of about forty in a quilted canvas vest, with his thumbs hooked in his belt, not smiling at all.
On the back, in June's handwriting: The Twenty. Christmas 1986. God help us.
And under the photograph, held together with a binder clip, there was a stack of small, ragged, odd-sized pieces of paper.
Some of them were index cards. Some were the backs of fuel receipts. One was a page torn out of a pocket logbook, and one was a paper napkin from a Waffle House, and one was the cardboard flap off a box of Remington shotgun shells. They were all different shapes and sizes and in various stages of disintegration, yellowed, softened, creased, stained with coffee and grease and in one case what looked very much like blood. And every one of them had the same thing written on it, in the same blunt, square, forward-leaning hand, in pencil or ballpoint or, on the napkin, in what appeared to be a carpenter's marker:
OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb
He had written twenty of them. Nora had found seventeen.
* * *
The winter of 1986 had nearly killed Whitcomb Freight Lines.
It had nearly killed half of Oklahoma. The oil bust had come first, in '82 and '83, when the price of crude fell through the floor and took the rigs with it, and then the banks, and then the farm crisis on top of that, land prices collapsing, wheat prices collapsing, farms going under one after another all across the plains. Amos had built Whitcomb Freight over fifteen years from a single used cattle truck into a fleet of twenty-two rigs hauling grain and cattle and drilling pipe from the Panhandle to the Gulf, and in the space of eighteen months he watched almost every customer he had either go bankrupt or stop paying. By the fall of '86, the First National Bank of Enid had called his loans. By Thanksgiving, he could not make payroll.
He had called a meeting in the garage behind the yard in Enid, on a Saturday morning, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was cold. There was a kerosene heater in the middle of the floor and everybody stood around it with their hands out. He had twenty-six drivers then. He stood up on the running board of a truck so they could all see him, and he told them the truth.
He told them the company was broke. He told them he could pay them through the end of November and then he could not pay them anymore, not for a while, maybe a long while, maybe never. He told them that if they wanted to go find work somewhere else, he would write each of them the best reference letter he had ever written, and he would not blame a single one of them, and he would shake their hands on the way out.
And he told them that if any of them wanted to stay — to keep driving, for nothing, for fuel money and whatever he could scrape together, for as long as it took — he could not promise them anything. Except one thing.
"If we make it," he had said, standing on that running board in the cold with his breath smoking, "if this company is still standing when this is over, I'll owe every one of you something I can never pay back. I know that. But I'll tell you what I'll do. You all see that black Cadillac that the bank president drives? The one he parks in front of the bank in the handicapped spot every Monday morning so we all have to walk around it?"
There had been a rumble of laughter. They all knew that car.
"Every one of you that stays," Amos had said, "I'm going to buy you one. Brand new. Black. Just like his. And you're going to drive it to that bank and park it in his spot."
They had laughed harder. Somebody had said, "You're crazy, Amos," and somebody else had said, "Put it in writing," and everybody laughed again — and Amos had gotten down off the running board and borrowed a pencil from Hank Doyle's shirt pocket and, one at a time, on whatever paper anybody had, had put it in writing.
Six men left that day. He shook their hands and wrote their letters and did not blame them.
Twenty stayed.
They drove for nothing through December and January and February and March of 1987, through ice storms in the Panhandle and blizzards on I-40 and a February so cold the diesel jelled in the tanks. They slept in their cabs to save motel money. Their wives took second jobs. The two women drivers, Ida Pruitt and Rosalie Vance, ran a double route between them for six weeks when Rosalie's husband was in the hospital, trading off sleep in the bunk. Hank Doyle sold his bass boat. Clyde Mercer sold his wedding ring and did not tell his wife until it was over. In April, a grain co-op in Kansas that Amos had hauled for, on credit, all winter, finally paid up, and then a pipe company in Tulsa, and then another, and the bank backed off, and in June of 1987 Whitcomb Freight Lines made payroll for the first time in seven months.
The company grew after that. It grew for thirty-five years. By the time Amos sold it, three weeks ago, to a national carrier out of Dallas, it had four hundred trucks and eleven terminals and a name you could see on the sides of trailers from Denver to Memphis.
But he had never bought the Cadillacs.
He had meant to. Every year, he had meant to. But in 1988 the company needed new trucks, and in 1990 it needed a new terminal, and in 1993 his son was sick, and in 1996 the company needed everything at once, and there was always a reason, always something more urgent. And the drivers had laughed about it, at first, and then stopped laughing, and then stopped mentioning it at all, and some of them retired, and some of them moved away, and some of them died. Hank Doyle died in 2009. Clyde Mercer in 2014. Rosalie Vance, who had driven double routes in the winter of '87 while her husband was in the hospital, died in 2019, and at her funeral her daughter had come up to Amos in the parking lot of the Methodist church and shown him a piece of cardboard torn off a box of shotgun shells, soft as cloth now, and said, "She kept it in her Bible. She used to say you'd make good on it one day. She said you always made good."
He had stood in that parking lot and not been able to say anything at all.
June had died the next year. And in the long quiet afterward, alone in the house above the Cimarron, he had found himself thinking about that piece of cardboard more and more, until he could not think about anything else.
When the Dallas company made their offer, he had taken it the same afternoon. Nora had thought he was crazy. She was his accountant as well as his granddaughter, and she had wanted him to wait, negotiate, get another bid. He had told her he was seventy-six years old and he did not have time to wait. Then he had told her about the IOUs. She had sat across the kitchen table from him and listened to the whole thing without saying a word, and when he was done, she had gotten up and gone out to her car and come back with a legal pad, and started making a list.
It had taken her three weeks to find them. Eleven of the twenty were still alive. For the other nine, she had found widows, children, in one case a grandson. Seventeen of them still had the IOU. Some had kept it in Bibles, some in tackle boxes, some framed on a wall. One, Ida Pruitt, who was ninety now and lived in a care home in Guymon, had kept hers in her purse, every day, for thirty-eight years. When Nora had explained why she was calling, the old woman had been quiet for a long time on the phone, and then she had said, "Tell Amos I want mine with a tape deck."
They did not make cars with tape decks anymore. Nora had told her that. Ida had said, "Then tell him he'd better find me a cassette player I can plug in, or I'm not getting in it."
* * *
He put the photograph back in the envelope. He put the IOUs back under it, and the list, and the cashier's check on top, and he wrapped the rubber band around it twice and laid it on the passenger seat and started the truck.
Nora had wanted him to go to the big Cadillac dealership in Oklahoma City. They had more inventory, she said. They would have twenty black Escalades on the lot, or close to it. They could do it in a day.
He had said no. He had said Ridgeline.
He had not told her why. He had not told anybody why. But in the spring of 1971, when Amos Whitcomb was twenty-two years old and had a wife and a baby on the way and a hundred and sixty acres of land that the bank owned more of than he did, he had gone to every bank in four counties to try to borrow money for a used cattle truck so he could haul his neighbors' stock to market, and every bank in four counties had looked at his boots and his hands and his clothes and told him no. And then he had gone, out of nothing but desperation, to a small used-car lot on the edge of a little town on Route 62, where a heavyset man with a toothpick in his mouth and a name tag that said VERNON had walked out across the gravel to meet him.