The Tractor at the Church Door

The tractor

You have to understand what that tractor is, or none of this makes sense.

It’s a 1956 John Deere 60, green and yellow, two cylinders. If you grew up around farms you know the sound.

Pop, pop, pop, slow and steady, and you can hear one coming from a mile off on a still morning. People call them Johnny Poppers.

My father bought it new from the dealer in Loyal in the spring of 1956.

He paid for it with a milk check and a loan from his brother. 1956 was the last year they made the 60, and he always said he got the best one because they’d worked all the bugs out.

It has a narrow front end, the two front wheels tucked close together, the way they built them for row crops.

It has a hand clutch you push forward with your right arm. And it has those big round fenders over the back wheels, wide enough to sit on if you sit careful.

I learned to drive on it when I was nine. My father stood on the drawbar behind the seat with one hand on my shoulder and the other on the fender, and he never said a word unless I was about to put us in the ditch.

When I married Joan in June of 1987, at this same church, I drove that tractor home from the reception with her on the left fender.

She held her veil in her lap the whole four miles so it wouldn’t blow off into Herb Peterson’s soybeans.

There’s a photo of it in our hallway. Joan in her big sleeves, me in a rented gray tux, both of us laughing at something my brother yelled. That photo has hung by our bedroom door for thirty-nine years.

Katie used to stand in front of that photo when she was little.

When she was six, she pointed at it one day and said, “When I get married, I’m going home on Dad’s tractor too.”

Joan laughed and said, “We’ll see.” Katie said, “No, I mean it.”

She said it at eight, and at twelve, and at sixteen when she was embarrassed about everything else we did.

She said it when she left for vet school in Madison. She said it on the phone the night Ben proposed.

So when she and Ben set the date for the second Saturday in October, I started working on that tractor. New plugs.

New fan belt. I rebuilt the carburetor over the winter, at the kitchen table, on newspapers, while Joan pretended not to mind.

I never told anybody I was doing it. I didn’t have to. Everybody in our family just knew. Katie was leaving her wedding on Dad’s 60. It was as settled as Christmas.

What I didn’t know was that Katie had mentioned it to Susan, back in the summer, at a bridal shower in Edina.

And I didn’t know that Susan had been quietly planning around it ever since.