He was looking somewhere other than where he was going. One time when he was coming to pick me up at sundown I sat on the tractor and watched run the truck through a barbed wire fence. He depended on the truck to know what a horse knows and behave like one. Probably he drove the truck a lot the same way he rode a horse. When I heard that I thought there also ought to be a law against mistreating a fine machine like that truck. I had heard him talk a time or two about horses being mistreated, and how he hated to see it, and how there was actually a law against mistreating a horse. He was a great lover of horses, and knew all about them. On a horse, now, that old gent was the picture of grace.
That summer I was 21, and would have given my right shirt sleeve and the arm along with it to own a truck like that one, and it was horrible to see it suffer so. He'd just slip the clutch out and let that machine scream in pain. He burned tractor gas in that nice truck and at such a slow speed in high gear it would start to buck a little and he would notice at last that things weren't going right and he would stomp the clutch down and gun the engine. It would get down so slow the engine would go to knocking in pain. Until finally the truck would beg to be shifted into second, but he wouldn't hear it pleading. He would chug along a country road, staying inside himself, wandering around among his thoughts, and he would go slower and slower and slower. But he could commit a great lot of driving sins at 10 miles an hour. The only favorable remark I can make about his driving is that he never was a speeder. I was hoping he would let me walk so I wouldn't have to get in that truck, but he always had time to take me. I would tell him I wouldn't mind walking, if he didn't have time to deliver me.
The field might be a mile or a mile and a half from the house. Early every morning the old gent would take me to whatever field I was working in, and come back and get me at sundown. He would floorboard the gas, to make the truck move in high, and he didn't seem to notice the pain the engine was feeling. That was a good engine, and a fine truck, or else it wouldn't have lasted past the Fourth of July. I would sit in that cab and clench my jaws and suffer, when he started the truck in high gear. When he got in and started up, he often left the shift lever in the position it was in, whether it was low or high or whatever. He tried to drive that vehicle as if it had an automatic transmission, which it did not, not in 1941. He was a horse person and did not recognize the need to shift the truck's gears very often. Ruined the engine, anyhow, and the clutch and, I expect, the transmission. When I quit in September to go back to school, that old fellow had just about ruined his truck. He had this pickup truck that was almost new when I hired on in June. I worked for him one summer back in the early '40s. My personal all-time worst driver, that I told about when my turn came, was an elderly rancher up in the Panhandle.
#Hale theater drivers#
At the afternoon coffee hour the discussion got onto bad drivers, and everybody at the table took a turn at telling about the worst drivers they ever knew.