The Little Ford That Pulled the Excavator Out

Brent knew all that. He’d heard me tell it at Thanksgiving. He just didn’t care about it, and I’d known that for a long time.

He walked back toward his pickup still grinning. Shane looked over at me for a second longer than he had to, and touched the bill of his cap.

I nodded back. I’ve always thought you can tell a lot about a man by who he looks at after a joke.

Cole came over and stood by the rear wheel. He’s fourteen, all elbows and feet that summer, and he’d been riding the bus out to my place after school so he could watch the big machine work.

“Grandpa, he was just kidding,” he said.

“I know it,” I said. “Climb up and back it into the shed for me.”

He looked at me like I’d handed him the keys to a Cadillac. I’d let him drive it before, but never with the crew watching.

He climbed up, found the clutch with his boot, and backed it into the shed so straight you could have laid a level on it.

That was all I did about it that day. I’ve lived long enough to know that most of what people say to you is about them, not you. I just didn’t know yet what it was about for Brent.

It started raining Tuesday night.

It wasn’t a storm. It was the kind of cold, gray October rain that settles in and stays, the kind you hear on the barn roof all night and wake up to still hearing.

By Wednesday noon the gauge on my fence post said an inch and a half.

The crew couldn’t pour in that, so they worked around it. Shane dug out the old pipe and set the new one in the creek bed, a big galvanized culvert six feet across that came out on a flatbed and took the whole crew to guide in.

Wednesday night it rained another inch. Thursday morning the creek was brown and running fast, and the banks on both sides had gone soft as cake batter.

I went down after dinner to look. That’s the noon meal, for anybody under fifty.

Brent’s excavator was sitting up on the east bank where Shane had been backfilling, and I didn’t like where it was sitting.

Brent was on the phone in his pickup. Shane was in the cab. I walked over and stood by the track and looked at the ground under it.

“Shane,” I said, when he opened the door. “That bank’s been undercut. The old pipe washed it out from underneath for years. I wouldn’t sit on it.”

He looked down at the ground, then over at Brent’s pickup. “I told him,” he said quietly. “He wants the backfill done before the weekend.”

I nodded and walked back up the hill. It wasn’t my machine, and it wasn’t my business, and I’d already said the sensible thing to the man who could hear it.