The Farmall That Plowed Us to Town

I had the flashlight in my hand before the alarm on the oxygen machine started beeping. I hooked him to the first green tank, the way the delivery man had shown me, and turned the little dial to two.

Gene put his hand on my wrist while I did it. “You’re all right,” he said. “I’m all right. Go look at it.”

I went out to the porch in my robe and Gene’s barn coat. It was eighteen below on the thermometer by the door. The generator was full of gas, and it would not start.

I pulled the cord until my shoulder burned. I gave it the choke and took it off the choke. It coughed once and never coughed again.

Gene could have fixed it. Ten years ago he could have fixed it in the dark. But he could not walk to the porch without resting, and the cold air would have closed his chest up like a fist.

I came back in and told him it was dead. He did not argue.

“Five hours a tank,” he said.

“A little over,” I said. “Fifteen, all told.”

He looked at the clock on the stove. We did not say the rest.

I sat up the rest of the night in the kitchen in my coat, with the gas oven open for heat, and I prayed. I am not a woman who prays out loud. I pray the way I play the organ, quietly, the same few things over and over until they wear a path.

At half past eight I changed him to the second tank. The sun came up hard and bright on a white world. No wind at all, finally. You could hear a crow two miles off.

I walked to the end of the drive and climbed the drift and looked south toward town. Our road was a smooth white field.

A mile north, I could see where the plow had come along the east and west road, a clean dark cut, right up to our corner. It had turned around there. It had left a ridge of snow across the mouth of our road taller than my head.

Every other road I could see from that drift was open.

Our road is gravel with one house on it, and in a big storm the county does the blacktop and the bus routes first. Nobody at the shop would think twice about a dead end. That was how a man could skip it for three days and nobody notice.

I stood there until my face went numb. Then I walked back to the house and sat down across from my husband.

“I’m going to get the Farmall out,” I said.

---

Gene did not tell me I was crazy, which is one of about a thousand reasons I married him.

He looked at me a long time. Then he said, “The chains are already on.”

They were. He had put them on the back tires in December, so I could scrape the yard and push snow away from the hay bales. The blade was already on too.

It was a 1956 Farmall 400, red once and now the color of an old barn. Gene’s father bought it new the year Gene was born.