The Tractor No Hand Went Up For

The Row By The Fence

I found the tractor by its wheels. A man can repaint a hood, and I would not have known it from forty feet. But Earl ground the lug weights on the back tires himself.

He left a thumbprint of silver in the red where the grinder slipped that day. I had kept house with that thumbprint for nineteen years. I knew it like I knew his hands.

It sat in the long row along the fence at the Shipshewana consignment grounds. It was wedged between a grain drill with a bent tongue and a flail mower nobody had bothered to clean.

Lot tag 40 was wired to the steering wheel. It was wired on with the same soft baling wire we keep in a coffee can in our own barn. That detail is the one that put my knees to water.

I stood there in my church shoes in the gravel and could not make my feet work. The sun was already up hard for October.

It was the kind of bright clear morning that makes a sale lot look like a county fair.

Three hundred men in caps were moving down the rows. They had coffee in one hand and sale bills in the other, writing numbers in the margins. Nobody was looking at the woman gone still by the fence.

I had driven up to buy a stock tank. That is the honest truth of it.

Earl’s sister had called and said the fall consignment was Saturday, and I thought a drive would do me good.

I needed it after the week I had put in. A week of sitting in a vinyl chair in a hospital in Fort Wayne, sixty miles south, listening to machines count out my husband’s breaths.

Nobody had told me the Farmall would be here. Nobody had told me, because the man who brought it knew exactly what I would do if I knew. He counted on me not coming.

I put my hand on the cold cast iron of the fender. I said his name out loud to the empty seat.

Earl. Like he could answer me from a bed with a tube down his throat.

A boy I did not know walked past and slowed. He said, nice old M, you bidding on her. I said no. I said, she is not for sale. He gave me a look and kept walking.

It was the look you give a woman who has wandered in from the wrong parking lot. I did not blame him.

I did not look like a woman who was about to do what I was about to do.