The Farmall That Plowed Us to Town

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

I did not say it to hurt him. I said it because it was true. He had not come at Christmas. He had not called. He would have known if he had called.

He looked back at the pickup and said, very quietly, “How much has he got?”

“Till about two on the one he’s got on. Then one more.”

“And the power’s out.”

“Since Sunday. The generator quit last night.”

He put both hands over his face, gloves and all, for maybe five seconds. When he took them away, he was not a boy anymore. He was a county man with a job to do.

“Stay right here,” he said. “Don’t move that tractor.”

---

He climbed back up and got on the radio. I saw him talking a long time. Then he backed that big truck a quarter mile down the road to the Schmidt field entrance, where the culvert was wide enough to turn.

I watched him swing it around in three cuts with the wing up. It is not an easy thing to do, and he did it well.

Then he came back up pointed south, toward town, and stopped in front of my blade with his tailgate to me.

He leaned out his window. “Follow me. Stay back thirty feet so you don’t catch my sand. I’ll go slow.”

So that is what we did. Trent’s plow went first, cutting a road wide enough for a semi. I came behind on the Farmall with my blade up, in third gear, on gravel and sand.

And behind me came Gene, in the pickup, on a road that was finally a road.

Two miles. Trent never went faster than I could keep up. Every few hundred yards I saw his face in his side mirror, checking on us.

---

Donna had been the pharmacist in town for twenty-six years. She kept a rack of oxygen tanks in back for the supply company in Spencer, for exactly this kind of week.

Trent had radioed the county shop. The shop had called the sheriff’s office, and they sent a deputy to bang on Donna’s back door, because she lived above the store.

By the time we came down Main Street, she had the back door open and three full tanks standing on a hand truck.

Trent pulled the plow up out of the way and was down out of the cab before I had the tractor shut off. He went to the pickup and opened Gene’s door.

“Uncle Gene,” he said. “Let me help you.”

Gene looked at him. He did not say anything. He just held up his arm, and Trent took it.

Between the two of us we got him in through the back door and into the chair Donna keeps by the counter for people waiting on prescriptions.

Donna changed him to a full tank herself. She took his pulse with two fingers and looked at his fingernails, and then she let out her breath and smiled at me.

“He’s all right, Marlene,” she said. “He’s tired and he’s cold, but he’s all right.”

That was when I sat down on the floor. I did not mean to. My legs just quit, and I sat on her cold linoleum in Gene’s chore coat and put my head down on my knees.