Elmer

Fifty years ago, in the Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho, I was detailed by the rancher who was my boss to help Elmer Brown harvest a few thin crops of oats from a dry hillside that his family farmed for more than a hundred years.
     I was in my early thirties, hung-over every morning from chasing barmaids around pool tables. Elmer was a short person, an 89-year-old widower without teeth. He wore bib overalls, lived in the house his mother built in the late 1800’s, required a booster pillow to see over the steering wheel of his Oldsmobile, and hoarded scrap iron.
     He lived in the kitchen of the three-story home. The rest of the house was crammed with stuff, floors to tin ceiling.  Paths led through towers of magazines, winter coats, cigar boxes and unopened mail. Propped in the living room doorway was a tidy bundle of a hundred curtain rods.
     Our workdays began with a ritual. At sunrise I wandered from my little bunkhouse on the prairie, up the steep two-lane gravel road called Elmer’s Lane, parked my old red stock truck on the creek side of the house, then walked up a few steps onto a small back porch, tapped on the door, looked through the leaded window, and Elmer would wave me into the kitchen. 
     Each morning, we spent a quiet half hour at a round wooden table while Elmer ate his cornflakes. He didn’t hear well enough to be a conversationalist. I never ate breakfast with him. Sometimes we lunched together on white bread, Spam, and mustard sandwiches. Elmer drank instant iced tea without the ice. 
    Elmer’s harvesting machinery was old, orange, open-air, but reasonably dependable. My job was simply as an operator. I made no decisions. Elmer was no longer strong enough to steer the beast, but he had farmed that same steep chunk of high mountain sidehill with mules and horses and he knew his own land. He stood behind me on the combine every swath for three seasons, pointing out how to negotiate around certain swales and springs and when to run up and downhill instead of across the contour.  Elmer figured that if the machine rolled, he was supposed to be on it.
     When we had a hopper full of grain, we crawled up to a couple of small, corrugated, granaries by an old yellow pine that was larger than four grown men could hold hands around. On a good year, there were more oats than could be stored. When grain bins were full, the final few combine loads went into a WWII dump truck.
     I only saw Elmer’s temper once, during that first year, when we hauled the load of surplus to be stored at the Farm Service. I was to drive the old green truck. Elmer would lead in his car to show me the route and make sure the weigh ticket was accurate.  My instructions were to put the truck in compound low, first gear, granny, drive it up the hill to the top of the ridge and then be sure to leave it in the lowest possible gear all the way down the steep gravel road and onto the flats by the irrigation ditch. 
    I set up everything as instructed and things seemed to be going as planned. When I topped the hill, Elmer’s car was a quarter mile out in the lead, doing fifteen at tops down the middle of the road, as was Elmer’s style.  I could see the top of his tractor hat just above the seat back. The engine in the old truck was sounding strong. I lit a Camel for the ride down into the flats.
    Elmer neglected to tell me that there were no brakes on the truck, which I discovered halfway down the grade when I was in granny low and gaining ground on the car and I stomped on a limp pedal. Pumping it had no effect. Elmer’s car was getting closer. No horn, not that Elmer could’ve heard it. No lights. There weren’t many alternatives. I could take the ditch and roll the load. I could smack Elmer’s car with his own truck. 
     A few seconds before the truck and the car were to mate, Elmer glanced in his mirror and jerked over just far enough for me to blow past. I didn’t get the whole thing stopped until way down by the highway. Elmer came hobbling up to the truck, steamy and fussy, and asked me what in the heck had I been thinking. OK, so there were no brakes, he’d admit that, but he had driven that same truck without brakes off that hill a hundred times and never had this sort of thing happen. What was my problem?
    Elmer was too small and too old for me to get huffy with him. I just looked him in the eye and asked him if, on any of those hundred trips driving that brakeless truck, he had even once followed himself down that hill? He thought for a minute, smiled a little, and reckoned that I did have a point there. We didn’t eat Spam that day. Elmer bought me a burger in town. The next few years, he followed me down the hill. Never bothered to fix the brakes.