He Asked If I Missed Him From Before

My son was three years and two months old, and we were stuck at a level crossing when he asked, in his small conversational way, why I looked so much younger than when we drove the green truck together.

We have never owned a truck. I laughed and asked what truck, and he sighed — an old man's sigh, patience for a slow apprentice — and said the green one, with the chain on the gate, when we took the logs down the switchback and I let him work the winch even though the boss said not to.

My grandfather hauled timber in the 1960s, four hundred kilometres from where we live. He died eleven years before my son was born. I know exactly two facts about his work life, and my son had just recited one of them: the winch story, which Grandpa told me once, when I was ten, about a young lad he'd secretly taught on the switchback runs. The lad, in Grandpa's telling, had died young — an accident on another crew — and Grandpa never forgave the industry for it.

I kept my voice level, the way the parenting forums tell you to, and asked what else we did. My son listed: tea from a thermos lid that tasted like metal. A dog at the depot called some name like Buller or Bullet. And that I — meaning whoever I was in this — used to whistle through a grass blade, which he then attempted against the car window.

At home I called my great-aunt, the only one left from that generation. The depot dog was Bullard. She remembered the lad too, and his name, and she asked me very quietly why I wanted to know after all these years.

My son is five now and remembers none of it — the window closed the way everyone says it does. But he still can't pass a logging truck without going silent and watching it the whole way out of sight.