The Farmall That Plowed Us to Town

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She started on the fourth try.

The first three times she turned over slow and sour, and I was afraid I would run the battery down. Gene had kept it in the basement on the charger, and I had carried it out and put it back in that morning myself.

I had watched him do that a hundred times and never once done it. I gave the air cleaner one more short shot, and pulled the choke, and she caught.

A Farmall in the cold sounds like an old man clearing his throat, and then it settles into that steady putt you can hear across a section.

I sat there with the blue smoke rolling out the shed door into the sunshine, and I cried a little. I had not known until she started how scared I was that she would not.

I let her warm up ten minutes by my watch. Then I put on everything I owned. Long underwear, two pairs of wool socks, insulated bibs, and Gene’s old canvas chore coat over my own coat.

A stocking cap. A scarf wrapped twice around my face. Choppers, the leather mittens with wool liners. I looked like a feed sack with eyes.

Gene was dressed and waiting by the back door. We put the third tank on the passenger seat of the pickup, buckled in like a child.

I helped him out one step at a time. The cold hit him at the door and he bent over coughing, and I held him and said nothing until it passed.

Then he was in the pickup with the heater roaring and the cannula in his nose and the second tank between his knees. He gave me a thumbs up through the windshield.

It was nine thirty. The tank on his lap would carry him until about two. The one on the seat was all we had after that.

I climbed up on the Farmall, put her in second, dropped the blade, and pushed into the ridge the county had left across our road.

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The first quarter mile took forty minutes.

The drift past our drive was packed like plaster. I took a bite the way Gene said, maybe three feet, and the back tires spun and the chains bit, and we went another foot.

I lifted the blade and backed up and did it again. And again. Snow came over the blade and over the hood and blew back in my face, fine as flour, and froze on my scarf.

Every time I backed up, I could see Gene through the windshield behind me, his face small and gray, watching.

Past the grove the road got better. The wind had scoured some stretches almost bare and piled the snow up in others. I could do a hundred yards in third and then hit a drift up to the radiator.

I learned to read the snow. Smooth and shiny meant hard. Rippled meant soft. Where the ditch grass stuck up through, the road was underneath, and I followed the grass like fence posts.

At the first mile I passed the Krugers’ lane. Their big tractor was buried to the cab by the shed, but there was smoke from the chimney. Somebody came to the window and waved. I could not wave back.