The Preacher's Kid #2 - Open Country

The first time I saw Beau Merrill, he was backing Caleb’s delivery truck toward our dock and losing an argument with the trailer.

It was Tuesday, quarter to ten. The truck entered the alley in a series of stops and hard corrections, engine revving, air brakes coughing. By the time I stepped outside, the trailer sat crooked across the loading area and one rear tire had climbed the curb.

Caleb stood below the driver’s window with his cap pushed back.

“Cut it left.”

The young man behind the wheel leaned out to look. “My left or your left?”

“We have the same left, Beau.”

“That don’t feel right.”

He turned the wheel. The trailer swung wider and knocked over our trash can.

Caleb closed his eyes.

“Other way,” he said.

“I did the other way.”

“You did the same way harder.”

Beau put the truck in park and grinned down at him. He had sandy hair escaping beneath a seed-company cap and the open, pleased expression of a man attending an event somebody else would have called a disaster.

“I’m gonna be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t think the trailer respects me yet.”

“It has no reason to.”

Caleb noticed me on the dock. An apology passed across his face, followed closely by a plea that I remember every detail for later.

“Morning, Noah. This is Beau. Beau’s learning.”

“Slowly,” Beau said.

He climbed from the cab and offered me his hand as if we were meeting after church instead of beside a flattened trash can.

“Beau Merrill.”

He looked about twenty-five, lean through the waist and loose in the shoulders. His handshake was firm without turning into the small contest most men made of it. He held my eyes. Nothing flickered beneath the look. No challenge, no question, no quick check to see whether Caleb had noticed.

“Noah Hale.”

“Preacher’s boy, right? Passed your church coming in on 87. Pretty building.”

“It photographs well.”

Beau barked out a laugh. The line had not earned that much, but he gave it anyway.

Caleb looked up at the sound. He had been trying not to like Beau for three weeks. I could already tell he was failing.

Caleb backed the trailer in himself. Four clean movements, no commentary. Beau watched beside me with his arms folded, studying the mirrors.

“Makes it look like nothing,” he said.

“He’s been doing it twenty years.”

“People keep saying that like it’s encouraging. By that math, I’ll be good around the time I’m your daddy’s age.”

“You don’t know how old my father is.”

“Old enough to be better at this than me.”

They unloaded together. Beau was quick with the dolly and careful on the ramp, though he talked to Caleb, me, and several sacks of feed without expecting an answer from any of us. He had an odd way of making the back room appear worth seeing. He asked how long the pegboard had been there. He read labels on boxes. He found an old photograph of the store softball team and wanted everybody identified.

When the last pallet was down, he wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

“Y’all hiring?”

“No,” Caleb said.

“Dale would have to fight you for me.”

“Nobody is fighting for you. Get in the truck.”

“We’re late because of me,” Beau told me in a confidential tone loud enough to carry across the alley.

“I gathered.”

“Good meeting you, preacher’s boy.”

“Noah.”

“I know.”

He smiled once more and went.

I watched the truck pull out, Caleb driving this time. By then I had developed a habit of studying men before I decided I was studying them. Caleb had taught me the signs. A pause held too long. A wedding ring worried around a finger. A sentence offered and withdrawn before the other person could touch it.

Beau gave me nothing I knew how to use.

Not the blankness of a man hiding badly. I knew that silence. Beau seemed more like a house on a hot day with every window raised. In nine minutes, he had shown me his humor, his incompetence with a trailer, his admiration for Caleb, and his willingness to laugh at himself. None of it seemed selected for effect. I found no locked room in him and mistook that for proof there wasn’t one.

I put his name on my mental list anyway.

The habit was new. It was already difficult to stop.

Beau began taking lunch on our square.