The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

I was at the co-op. He called me at nine-fifteen and said, “Linda, I think you’d better come home.”

He was sitting on the shed floor with his back against the rear tire when I got there. He was gray and sweating and he kept apologizing.

The ambulance came out from town and took him to the hospital there, and they took one look at him and called for the helicopter to fly him to Sioux Falls.

I drove the sixty miles behind it in my car with my hands shaking so bad I had to pull over once by a section line and pray before I could go on.

I didn’t pray anything fancy. I just said, please, over and over, the way Gene hummed his one verse.

They put in two stents that afternoon. He had damage to the heart muscle, more than they wanted to see.

By Wednesday he had fluid on his lungs, and they put him on a breathing tube and kept him sedated so he would rest.

The doctor was a young woman with a kind face, and she was honest with us.

“We’ll know a lot more in a few days,” she said.

“He’s strong, and that helps. But I want you both to understand that even with a good recovery, he may not be able to do everything he did before. The heart has been hurt.”

Kyle was standing at the foot of the bed when she said that. I watched his face go white and then go still, the way a pond does when the wind quits.

He stayed until almost midnight that first night. He sat on the other side of the bed from me and didn’t say much, but once, when he thought I was asleep in the chair, I heard him say, “Come on, Dad. Come on.”

Just that. It was the most I had ever heard him say to anybody.

Wednesday and Thursday I stayed at the hospital. A woman from our church brought me a bag of clean clothes and a toothbrush and a casserole I had no way to heat.

Our pastor came Thursday and prayed with me in the family room, and then he sat with me and didn’t make me talk, which was the kindest thing anyone did that week.

Friday night I drove home because the nurses told me to. Gene was stable, they said, and I would be no good to him if I fell apart.

I got home after eleven. I fed the dog, I let him out, and I went to bed in my clothes. I never looked toward the shed.

And sometime on Friday, while I was sixty miles away holding Gene’s hand, Kyle had backed his pickup and his gooseneck up to that shed door and loaded his father’s tractor and hauled it to the auction.

When I got off the phone with Kyle that Saturday morning, I stood in the kitchen and thought about what I could do.

Gene could not sign anything. He had a tube down his throat and was asleep most of the day.

A tractor that old doesn’t have a title. Nobody in South Dakota titles a 1950 Farmall.

There is no piece of paper that says whose it is. There is only who has it, and who people believe.

I thought about calling the sheriff, and I knew how that call would go.