The Tractor No Hand Went Up For

The Phone Call That Started It

I have to back up to the Tuesday. You will think I am a fool otherwise, and the hardest judge I have is the one in my own chest that keeps asking how I did not see it coming.

Earl went down in the barn on Tuesday morning. He was cleaning the gutter behind the heifers like he had a thousand mornings.

I found him against the wall with the scraper still in his hand.

His face was wrong on one side. I knew before I touched him.

The squad took forty minutes to reach us out on county road 600, because that is how far out we live from town.

Then it was a stroke. Then it was his heart, quitting on top of the stroke, while they worked on him in the drive.

Then it was Fort Wayne, because our little county hospital could not hold a man that sick.

Kevin met me in the emergency waiting room that first night. He cried, and I held him, and I meant every bit of it.

He is Earl’s only son, forty-one now, and I helped raise him from twelve.

He has a crop-spray operation of his own. It has not had a good year since the one before last.

I knew that, the way you know things about family, but I did not think it on him then.

I did not think a thing of it when he asked me, on the Wednesday, what the plan was for the farm. I told him there was no plan but to get his daddy well. He said, sure, sure, of course.

On Thursday he asked me something else. Real quiet, out in the hallway by the vending machines. He asked whether Dad would ever drive again.

The doctor had just told us the left side might not come back all the way. I said I did not know.

I said I did not want to talk about it in a hallway. I went back in to sit with Earl.

That was the opening Kevin needed, and I handed it to him. While I sat holding his father’s good hand and reading him the grain prices off my phone, Kevin was forty miles north at our place.

He backed the gooseneck trailer up to the machine shed. He winched the Farmall up onto the deck and chained it down and drove it away in the afternoon light, and nobody was home to see.

He had a key to that shed because he is family. That is the part that still takes the wind clean out of me.

He used the key his father gave him to carry off the thing his father built.

What The Tractor Was

You have to understand what the tractor was, or none of the rest will land right. It was not just iron.

In our house it was close to a living thing with a name.

It is a 1948 Farmall M. Narrow front, the tricycle kind, with the two front wheels tucked together up under the nose.

International red, the real red, not the orange they went to later.

Earl’s father bought it new off the dealer in Goshen the year Earl was born. It worked that ground for thirty years.

Then it got parked behind the corn crib to rust under a tarp.

Earl pulled it out the first winter we were married. He was fifty then, tired of the dairy, and grieving his father.

He said he wanted one thing in his life he could finish with his hands.

He needed a project that could not die on him the way a milk cow dies on you. A tractor will wait.

A tractor does not get mastitis at two in the morning. I understood that about him.

It took him four winters. He split the tractor in the middle to get at the clutch.