The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

“Dad is never going to drive that tractor again, Linda. You heard the doctor the same as I did, so don’t make me be the one who says it out loud.”

That was my stepson, Kyle, at twenty minutes to seven on a Saturday morning in April.

I was standing in my kitchen in my socks with a cold cup of coffee, and he said it like he was reading me the weather.

“That’s your dad’s tractor,” I said. “He spent six winters on it. You know he did, Kyle. You brought the boys out to watch him paint the grille.”

“It’ll bring sixty-five hundred, maybe more,” he said. “That money goes to the hospital before you spend it on something else. Somebody in this family has to think ahead.”

Before you spend it. I held on to the counter after he said that.

Fourteen years I had been married to his father, and I still had not found the bottom of what Kyle thought of me.

I had not even known the tractor was gone. That is the part I still have trouble with.

It had been gone from our machine shed since Friday afternoon, while I sat in Sioux Falls holding Gene’s hand, and I had walked right past the shed door that night without looking in.

Merle Tschetter was the one who told me. Merle had been our neighbor to the east for forty years, eighty years old and still up before the sun.

He called at half past six, and his voice was careful, the way men his age sound when they think they might be overstepping.

“Linda, I’m sorry to bother you this early,” he said. “I’m looking at the sale bill for Dale’s consignment auction this morning. Lot 40 says 1950 Farmall M, restored, runs good. Is that Gene’s M?”

I told him it couldn’t be. Then I put on Gene’s old chore coat over my nightgown and walked out across the yard in the half dark, and I slid the big shed door open, and the place where the M had stood all winter was just a clean square of concrete.

There were tire marks in the dirt by the door, the double set a gooseneck trailer leaves. There was a rag folded on the workbench, the one Gene used for the last wipe down.

I should tell you about Gene, because none of this makes sense without him.

Gene Haugen was sixty-six that spring, a retired farmer who had rented out his ground to a younger couple down the road and kept forty acres of pasture and a dozen cows to give himself a reason to get up.

He was a quiet man with big hands and a laugh that came out mostly through his nose.

I married him when I was thirty-seven and he was fifty-two.

I had been keeping the books at the grain co-op in town for nine years by then, and he used to come in to settle his account and stay to talk about nothing.

It took him two years to ask me to supper. It took him one more to ask me the other thing.

Kyle was twenty-four when we married. He was already out of the house, already selling crop insurance out of an office in town, already engaged to Amber.

I told myself it would warm up. In fourteen years it had warmed up to about the temperature of a stock tank in March.