Chapter 6

Before I left ABE restoration, we had decided to remove the rear bed of the truck to get rid of the damage. The plan was to used a cutting torch and a crowbar. The manager of the company told me he could replace the damaged the bed with a different one easy enough, but he had to straighten the frame. He promised me that It would drive straight afterward.

I went back to the chicken house after my meeting with ABE. Lucy and I had dinner in town that night. I put my ragged hair into a pony tail and wrapped it with a rawhide strip. I did that only because Lucy was willing to fix it.

“So you are getting a second truck. Does that mean I can drive it,” Lucy asked over dinner.

“I don’t know yet. The truck is only worth what I paid for it at auction, because it has a new V-8 motor installed. It had only been installed a few months before the accident. That motor had less than eight thousand miles on it at the time of the accident. ABE promised me an aluminum box bed for the rear. When I get it back, I should only have about five thousand in it. The truck might not look like much, but will do everything I could ask it to do. At least that’s the plan.

“Then whats our next project?” she asked.

“We have to do something about the small field.” I suggested. “You got any ideas?”

“What are you worried about?” she said.

“We have been very lucky since no one has walked up on the field. The fence and the rabbit traps keep the animal away, but if anyone sees it, then they have to know that the fence is out of place. They can look through the fence and see our plants for two or three months a year,” I explained. “You got any ideas.”

“I was up there a couple of years ago and the ivy you had planted along the fence blocks the view, but you are right if anyone approaches close they can see through it without much effort. A row of shrubs would be nice, but those in the middle of nowhere are going scream something to hide,” she said.

“Well you have stated the obvious. How about something new,” I suggested.

“How about this? When you get your truck ready, we go up the mountain and pick up some prickly ash. For a couple of hundred bucks you can buy a truck load of Prickly Ash plants. We can plant them outside the fence and in two years your ‘looky loo’ problems well be solved. Best of all that shit grows wild,” she explained.

“You know more about this than I do,” I agreed. “When we get the new truck, the mountain trip can be our test run. So call up and get your people rounding up the plants. This is a good time to dig them up.”

Even I knew enough to know that the cold of winter was a good time to transplant the hearty shrub. As long as the ground had stopped freezing hard. I ran the Cub tractor along the outside of the fence where I could reach. Then with Lucy’s help, I decided that it was enough. Her idea was to plant one plant very four to six feet and then expect it to fill in over a two year time frame. The gates where filled with what looked like window blind slats already. They obstructed the view. It wasn’t perfect, but it had worked so far.

Lucy got bored easily. She talked me into building a small greenhouse behind the barn. She assured me that it was just to give our plants a head start before transplanting them into our field. She was determined to prove her worth. That and like me, she was easily bored.

She even took an active roll in the landscape and lawn maintenance business. She did that even before ABE got the big truck ready. He had put out feelers to get just the right sized bed for the truck. Business must have been good, since he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish.

“The weather was getting better when I finally called him. Glad you called. I have your truck almost ready,” he said. I got you a ten foot bed. That bitch should hold all your landscape equipment and have room to walk around inside. It’s an older bed, so it’s all aluminum. It’s going to cost you about two grand to attach it. That includes the work on your frame.”

I caught the doubt in his voice. Man that is pretty steep for a used box bed and few bolts. Tell you what, I’ll do the two large but only if you will shoot the whole thing with an old flat army green paint?” I demanded.

“I can do that,” he agreed.

Once we picked up the truck and got it registered and insured, I drove it to Lucy’s home in the holler. Her aunts and siblings loaded the truck. They filled it with the Prickly Ash plants. Some of the old timers called it the Devil’s Walking Stick. The roots were packed inside a hand made newspaper wrapper. The wrapper was held in place with twine from the dollar store.

While we loaded the truck, Lucy’s mother made us coffee. I took a break with a cup of strong coffee and a muffin without icing. It wasn’t pretty, but it was good.

The truck made the trip without a problem. The back of the truck was filled with the Prickly Ash plants and they rode fine. Once we were back in town, Lucy insisted we unload the truck before we went to sleep. I backed the truck to a point just outside the open barn door.

I wore my thick gardening gloves while I handed the plants down to Lucy. I regretting that I hadn’t put the camper in the rear of the chicken house/barn. It make it a longer walk to get back to the storage part of the barn. For that particular load we opted to drop them on the right side of the front area. The camper filled almost all of the left half and it also filled twenty feet of the forty foot length inside the barn. In other words the camper filled 25% of the available space. The ash filled about a hundred sq feet of storage. The stack of ash trees lay on their sides and was still about four feet high. Lucy assured me that we could start replanting the ash very soon.