I was about five years old when my father Jack realized that I couldn’t see over the dashboard of the truck. I only saw the highway when we bumped over the railroad tracks going in and out of our hometown of Rideauville. I would focus my eyes on the portion of windshield that I could see and watch the blue sky and bits of greenery that came into view. I would also explore the crevices of the bench seat from time to time, feeling around and finding loose change, keys, screws, and nuts and bolts. When I wasn’t doing that, I would just watch Jack as he drove.

“I feel your eyes on me,” he said one day. “It’s too much goin’ on for you to be lookin’ at me all the time.”

At our next stop, he rummaged in the junk at the back of the truck and finally brought out three thick, tattered telephone books. He taped them together, wrapped a towel around them, and put them on top of the passenger side of the bench seat.

"Dinamarca Noite Comboio"
© Paulo Espirito Santo

"Go on and sit on that," he said. I climbed atop the new seat and saw the road stretched out in front of me. I stared through the windshield as if it were a television, watching cars and trucks and buses as they passed in the opposite direction, occasionally making out the faces of the passengers inside. I still watched Jack, though. I watched him as he drove, watched him while he did everything. I had seen him cut down trees, fix trucks and cars, help other drivers who had broken down on the highway. I had watched him milk cows and slop hogs, make sausage, build carports, and I sometimes watched him sleep.

Jack’s business was mostly hauling—carrying folks’ stuff from state to state if they couldn’t afford a real moving truck, keeping some or all of it if they balked at paying the agreed-upon price, and selling the rest to other folks who wanted cheap furniture. It seemed that people wanted to blame him for every broken chair leg, scratched table, or cracked vase they sustained after their three, four, or five hundred mile trip to get out of paying for the move.

“Truth be told, Dale,” Jack said to me, “most a these folks ain’t carryin’ nothin’ but junk from town to town, state to state. I charge for packing, but some of ‘em want to save a few dollars by packin’ they trash theyselves, and they don’t know how to pack, and time I arrive, they want to say I broke they sorry-lookin’ furniture, and they don’t want to pay. But see, I got a guarantee—I pack, I pay. If I pack it, I pay if anything gets broke, but that costs fifty dollars more. I always give folks a choice, and a guarantee, but folks is cheap, and then they try to cheat you when you finish the job. They think they can take advantage of me ‘cause I’m independent. That’s why I carry my gun wherever I go—in case folks get stupid on me.” The shotgun lay in the narrow space between the bench seat and the back window and Jack kept it covered with a blanket.

We rode down seemingly endless stretches of blacktop, past cornfields, rice fields, and cane fields all day and into the night. Some of the local roads were gravelly, others just dry red dirt that kicked up huge clouds of dust at the slightest breeze. Whenever we pulled out of a rest stop, Jack would go just as fast backing out as going forward, so if I wasn’t quick at cranking my window up, my eyes and throat would burn from the dust that billowed in. Jack never noticed. He'd be hunched over the steering wheel, frowning at the road, driving fast, stopping short. His long fingers gripped the steering wheel as he turned it sharply, hand over hand. His corded arms seemed to wrestle with the whole truck as he sang along with the Impressions on the soul station he kept the radio tuned to.

“There ain't no room, for the hopeless sinner....”

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©2006 Rebecca Williams
Rebecca Williams is a writer, teacher, and community activist. A former filmmaker and film instructor at New York University, she is currently a MAGNET fellow in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. "No Room for Sinners" is excerpted from her novel A Solitary Place.