The Photo I Slid in His Card

What The Dealer Said

I had the machine hauled to the dealer in town that week for an estimate. Just to know.

The service manager was a square built fellow named Jeff who had sold me the thing. He walked around it twice with his hands shoved in his back pockets.

“Frame’s tweaked,” he said finally. “See how the cab door won’t shut square?”

I looked. The door hung off true by an inch, maybe more.

“That’s not a bent panel, Wade. That’s the whole chassis racked. We can part it back together, but.”

He let the but hang there in the shop air the way a man does when the number is coming.

“But you’d be most of the way to a clean used one. And you’d never trust it on a side hill again. I wouldn’t.”

Thirty one thousand dollars to make it most of the way right. On a machine I still owed two years of payments on.

I thanked Jeff. I shook his hand. I had the loader hauled back to Merle’s place.

I did that because Merle kept saying he was going to handle it. And because I wanted, with everything in me, to believe a man I called family.

It sat in his equipment shed for a year. Then he needed the shed for a baler, so it came to mine.

It has been in the corner of my machine shed ever since. A seventy thousand dollar monument to the fact that I could not make myself push.

Ten Years Of Almost

I want to be fair to Merle, because he is not a cartoon villain. He is a proud man who came up with nothing.

He farmed rented ground his whole life. Ground he worked like it was his own and could never buy.

He always had a new truck in the yard and no cash in the bank. The truck was how a man told the coffee shop crowd he was doing fine.

Pride was the only equity Merle ever carried. I think he knew it. I think that is why he carried it so hard.

Every year or two I would bring up the loader, gentle as I could manage. I never once raised my voice to the man.

“Merle,” I would say, “we ought to settle up on that machine one of these days.”

He would get a look like I had slapped him across the mouth at Thanksgiving.

“I’m good for it,” he would say. “You think I forgot? I don’t forget what I owe a man.”

Then another winter would pass. Then another spring. Nothing ever moved but the calendar.

There was the spring of 2019, when I needed a loader bad and had to rent one by the day from the co op.

Forty five hundred dollars that season in rental, on top of the seventy I had already sunk. I did not tell Patsy the rental number. It would have broken her.

There was the branding day that same year, out at Merle’s. All the neighbors there, burgers on the grill, kids on the fence rail.

Merle stood by the chute telling the men how he had rolled my fancy track loader in the creek. He told it like a joke on me.

The men laughed because that is what you do at a branding. I laughed too, because that is what you do when it is your wife’s father telling it.