The Tractor That Stopped The Sale

Chapter 3

The cancer took Warren in fourteen weeks. In February he was culling cows in the cold with his breath hanging white around his head. By the end of May he could not get up on the Ford.

That was the thing that told me he knew. The morning he stood at the shed door and looked at that tractor and did not climb up, and turned around and went back to the house without a word. He had gotten up on that machine nearly every day for seventy years. When he stopped, we both understood the clock had started.

I nursed him at home. He did not want the hospital and I did not want it for him. I learned to run the morphine pump. I learned to turn a grown man without hurting him. I did the chores at dawn and the books at night and sat with him in between, and I would not trade those fourteen weeks for anything, as hard as they were.

Dale came by twice.

The first time he brought a casserole from his wife and stood in the doorway of the bedroom with his cap in his hands and could not make himself come in. Warren was asleep. Dale looked at the hospital bed and the oxygen and he said, “This place is a lot of work, Alma,” and I said it always had been, and he left.

The second time Warren was awake, and the two brothers talked low for a while with the door half shut. I did not listen. I was in the kitchen. But I heard Warren’s voice come up once, sharp, the only time it came up in all those weeks, and I heard him say, “She stays. You hear me. She stays.”

Dale came out past me without his coffee and drove off fast enough to throw gravel.

I asked Warren what that was about. He was tired by then, his eyes gone soft and far. He patted the bed for me to sit.

“Dale’s in a hole,” he said. “The bank’s got its hand on his place. He’s got it in his head that the family ground ought to stay family, and that you’ll want shed of all this once I’m gone.” He stopped to breathe. “He doesn’t mean you harm, Alma. He just can’t see a woman keeping it. Never could see what you are.”

I told him I did not want to talk about Dale.

He squeezed my hand with what strength he had. “It’s handled,” he said. “Everything’s handled. You just remember where I keep things. You remember the tin.”

I thought he was wandering. The medicine wandered him, those last days.

But I wrote it down anyway, the way I write everything down. Remember the tin. I put it on the grocery list magneted to the refrigerator, under eggs and stamps, because that is where I keep the things I cannot lose. And then, with everything that came after, I forgot it the way you forget a thing standing in plain sight.

He died on a Tuesday morning with the window open and the smell of cut hay coming in, because a neighbor was mowing the road ditch, and I have always been grateful for that neighbor and never told him why.

The funeral was Friday. The church basement was full. People I had fed and people who had fed me, forty-one years of a small-town life, all of them pressing my hand and telling me Warren was a good man, which he was.

Dale gave the eulogy. He was good at it. He talked about two boys on one tractor and there was not a dry eye in the place, mine included.

He stood up there in the suit he wore to his own wedding, let out at the seams now, and he told the one about the two of them hauling the first load of hay off the bottoms on that Ford when Warren was nine and he was six. How Warren let him steer on the flat and took the wheel back for the ditches. The whole church laughed and wept at once.

I sat in the front pew in my black dress and I believed, right up until Monday, that the man telling that story loved his brother more than he wanted his brother’s ground. I was half right. He did love him. He just wanted the ground more, and somewhere along the years he had taught himself the two were the same thing.

Then he drove home and, I would learn, called the sale barn the following Monday and told them the Teale place was coming up for auction, and that the widow had agreed.

Nine days. That is how long my husband had been in the ground when I found my life tacked to a feed store door.