The Buyer at the Machine Shed Door

I asked her what Arlo’s tractor was, then.

“It’s not stuff,” she said. “I know that now. I knew it when I saw the hand.”

“How do I make it right?” she asked. I had my answer ready.

“The homecoming parade is the last Friday of the month,” I said. “Arlo drove that tractor in it every year after he finished it. He’d pull a hay wagon full of kids from Sunday school. Last year and the year before, it didn’t go. Nobody had the heart.”

“This year it’s going,” I said. “And it needs to be perfect. Every inch of it, except one.”

She knew which one. I watched her know it. “I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do all of it.” And she did.

Every evening for two weeks, when she got home from the clinic, Savannah went out to the machine shed with a bucket and a stack of old towels and a tin of wax she bought at the farm store in Morris.

She looked up videos. She called a man in Benson who restores Fords and asked him questions until he finally said, “Honey, just come over Saturday and I’ll show you.” She went. She came home with blue paint on her chin.

She polished every bolt on that tractor. She did the gray fenders with a toothbrush. She found the original owner’s manual in Arlo’s file cabinet, read the whole thing, and started correcting Trent.

“You’re not supposed to do that with the throttle when it’s cold,” she told him on the second Sunday.

“How do you know?” he said. “Page fourteen,” she said. Trent looked at me. I shrugged. “Page fourteen,” I said.

Those Sunday lessons were the best part of my October.

The first one, Trent stalled it three times backing out of the shed, and Savannah sat on an upturned bucket and laughed so hard she had to hold her stomach, and Trent laughed too, finally.

I stood on the platform behind him with one hand on the fender, the way Arlo stood behind me in 2014, and said the same things Arlo said to me.

“Easy on the clutch. She’s older than both of us put together. Feel it catch. There. There it is.”

By the second Sunday, Trent could take it down the field road and back without stalling, and he could hitch the hay wagon on the first try, which took Arlo four years to get me to do.

On the last Sunday before the parade, Savannah asked if she could drive it. Trent looked at me.

“Ask the owner,” I said. “I’m the owner.” Savannah laughed and climbed right up.

So I taught her, too. She was better than both of us. She had the lightest touch on the clutch I have ever seen. Arlo would have liked that about her. He would have liked a lot about her, I think, if he had gotten the chance.

Karen came to the second lesson with lawn chairs and a thermos and sat at the edge of the yard like it was the county fair.

“So that’s it?” she said to me. “No bat. No yelling. You just let her off.”

“I didn’t let her off,” I said. “She took the ad down in front of me. She told my son what she did, to his face. She’s answered every one of those buyers. And she’s been out in that shed every night for two weeks with a toothbrush.”

Karen watched Savannah climb down off the tractor and wipe a smudge off the hood with her sleeve.