The Tractor That Stopped The Sale

Chapter 6

I gave myself eleven days, and I used every one of them.

The first thing I did was go see Dale. Warren would have wanted that. You do not ambush family without first giving them the chance to climb down.

I drove up his washed-out lane on a gray morning. His place told the whole story before he opened the door. A combine with the header off, sitting where it had quit. Round bales gone soft and black in the rain. A repo notice would not have surprised me.

He came out onto the porch and he had the decency to go pale when he saw me.

I did not raise my voice. I have found you do not need to.

I told him I had found the sale bill. I told him I had opened the safe. I told him I had the deed, recorded in April, my name alone, and that there was no estate and no sale, and that he knew it or he should have.

He did a thing I did not expect. He did not deny it. He sat down on the porch step like his strings got cut and he put his elbows on his knees.

“The bank gives me till spring,” he said to the boards between his feet. “I’m done, Alma. Thirty years and I’m done, and Warren’s gone, and all that good bottom ground is just sitting there under a woman who. ” He stopped himself.

“Under a woman who what,” I said.

He did not finish it. But I finished it in my head, and so can you.

He told me his version then, and the terrible thing is he believed it. He had told himself the family ground ought to stay in the family and come to him. He had told himself I would want out, would be glad to be shed of the work, would thank him in a year for the easy money and the little house in town. He had told himself the low price was so a neighbor could get it instead of some outfit from Des Moines. He had built a whole house of reasons and moved into it.

“You were going to sell my home out from under me,” I said, “nine days after I buried your brother, and tell yourself you did me a kindness.”

He could not answer that. There is no answer to that.

I will tell you what I did not do. I did not tell him I was coming to the sale. I did not tell him about the tractor, or about the letter Warren left, or what I meant to do in that ring. He had kept his plan from me. I kept mine from him. I am not proud of the satisfaction that gave me, but I am not going to lie about it either.

I drove home and I started on the Ford.

It had not run since May. Old gas gone to varnish in the carburetor. Points pitted, plugs fouled, the battery flat as a flitter. A younger woman, or a woman who had not spent forty years handing wrenches to Warren and watching, might have called somebody.

I did not call anybody. That was the whole point. Warren did not say call the men. He said you tell them, and a woman who has to be hauled to her own sale barn by a neighbor’s son is not telling anybody anything.

I drained the bowl and cleaned the jets with a strand of wire off a feed sack. I gapped new points with the feeler gauge from Warren’s bench, the one worn smooth where his thumb rode it. I put in plugs and a fresh battery from the Co-op, and I will admit I stood a long time in the Co-op aisle before I was sure I had the right ones, because knowing a thing and doing it with your own hands the first time alone are two different kinds of brave.

I barked my knuckles on the manifold and said a word I learned from Warren and do not use in church. I dropped the feeler gauge in the gravel twice and had to wipe it clean on my jeans. But every bolt I turned, I could hear him telling me, lefty loosey, Alma, let the tool do the work, do not go muscling it. By the end my hands knew that machine the way they know bread dough, and that is a knowing that does not leave you.

On the ninth day I turned the key and that engine coughed, caught, and settled into the chug I had heard across these bottoms my whole married life.

I sat on the seat with it running and I cried after all, finally, with nobody to see.

Then I wiped my face and I started practicing the ramp.