The Little Ford That Pulled the Excavator Out

The two young guys learned to do that without being told after the second time.

Brent stood by the dead-man the first hour with his arms crossed, watching the ground around the railroad tie like he expected it to come flying out. It didn’t move a quarter inch.

About the second hour, I noticed he’d uncrossed his arms. About the third hour, he was down by the chain helping the boys pull slack, in his good company jacket, mud to the knees.

Once, about four o’clock, the machine slid sideways a little when the bank caved under the right track, and the cable jumped and the chain snapped tight with a crack like a rifle. Cole’s fist went up before I’d even heard it. I stopped.

Nobody moved. The coat on the cable swung a little. The 8N held. The dead-man held. The machine sat there, crooked, with the water running around it.

Then Shane leaned out the cab door and called up the hill. “We’re good. Just the bank.”

I looked over at Cole. He had his fist still up and his face white as a sheet, but he hadn’t moved one step out of where I’d told him to stand.

“Good eyes,” I called to him. He swallowed and nodded.

At 4:40 the left track bit gravel at the top of the bank.

Shane gave it a little more, and the whole machine rolled up out of the mud like something being born, with brown water pouring off the tracks, and walked up onto the field road on its own.

He drove it thirty yards up onto firm ground and set the bucket down and shut it off. Then he just sat in the cab with his hands on the levers for a while.

I shut the 8N off too. In the quiet you could hear the creek, and a crow somewhere in the cottonwoods, and my own heart.

Nobody said anything. The two young guys looked at each other. Cole came over from where he’d been standing, slowly, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to move yet.

Then Brent walked down to where the logging chain lay on the stubble behind my tractor. He bent down and unhooked it from the cable.

He picked it up, coiled it over his arm, slowly, loop by loop, the way you’d coil it if it was yours and you cared about it.

His whole crew watched him do it. So did Cole. So did I.

He walked across the stubble with the chain on his arm and stopped at my front tire.

He stood there a second. He had mud on his jacket all the way up to his name stitched on the chest.

I’ll admit I didn’t know what he was going to do. I’d seen a lot of things in his face that week, and some of them weren’t kind.

He lifted the chain off his arm and laid it across the hood of the 8N, careful, so it wouldn’t scratch the paint.