The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

His mother had died when he was fifteen. Her name was Joan, and she had cancer that went fast and cost a great deal.

They had no insurance to speak of back then, the way a lot of farm families didn’t, and Gene sold cattle for six years to pay the hospital in Sioux Falls what they owed. Kyle remembered every cow that went on the truck.

I understood that, or I tried to. I was the second wife, the bookkeeper from town, the woman who came along after the hard years were over.

I never tried to be his mother. I just tried to be decent to him, and to Amber, and to their two boys, and to wait.

The Farmall was Gene’s winter project. He bought it eight years ago in the fall, a rusted-out M that had been sitting in a grove on a farm north of Brookings since the seventies.

He paid four hundred dollars for it and had to pull it onto the trailer with a come-along because the rear wheels were seized.

That first winter he did nothing but take it apart and lay the pieces out on the shed floor on old feed sacks, every bolt in a coffee can with a strip of masking tape on it.

I would bring him supper out there and he would show me what each piece was, like I was going to be tested on it.

The second winter he rebuilt the engine. New sleeves and pistons, the valves ground, the magneto sent off to a man in Iowa who knew them. He hummed hymns the whole time he worked.

“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” was his favorite, and he only knew the first verse, so he hummed that one over and over until I could hear it in my sleep.

The third winter was the transmission and the brakes. The fifth was new rear tires, which cost more than the whole tractor had, and a new seat, and the wiring.

The sixth winter was paint. He painted it in pieces in a booth he made out of plastic sheeting, and he let our step grandson, Kyle’s oldest boy, Tyler, help with the grille. Tyler was seven then.

Gene stood behind him with his hand over the boy’s hand on the spray gun, and the grille came out a little heavy on one side, and Gene said it was the best part of the tractor.

The first time the M ran, it was a Sunday afternoon in March, two years before all this.

Gene came into the house and didn’t say anything, just took my hand and walked me out to the shed in my slippers.

He climbed up and pushed the starter and that old four-cylinder caught on the second turn.

He sat up there grinning with the shed full of blue smoke, and then he shut it off and leaned down and said, “Listen to that, Linda. Listen to it tick.”

I stood there listening to the engine cool, and I thought I had never seen a man so happy about anything.

After that he drove it in the Fourth of July parade in town two summers running, with Tyler and his little brother, Ben, riding on the drawbar hitch with their hands on Gene’s shoulders.

He was going to teach Tyler to drive it the summer the boy turned ten. That was this summer.

The heart attack came on a Tuesday, four days before the auction.

Gene was out in the shed in the morning, putting the M’s battery on the charger like he did every few weeks to keep it fresh.