The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

“He isn’t,” I said. That was all I said. He looked at me a long moment, and then he looked down at the tractor, and then he nodded slowly, the way men do when they are filing something away.

I found Kyle at the back of the crowd by the lunch stand. Amber wasn’t with him. When he saw me coming he set his jaw.

“Don’t do this here,” he said.

“Pull it, Kyle,” I said. “Just tell Dale to pull it. Nobody has to know anything. I’ll take it home myself. Please.”

“I’m not pulling it,” he said. “You don’t understand what’s coming. You’ve never seen what a hospital does to a family. I have.”

“I keep the books for half this county,” I said. “I know what a hospital bill looks like.”

“You don’t know what it looks like when it’s yours,” he said, and his voice cracked a little on the last word.

“Mom died owing Sioux Falls eleven thousand dollars. Dad sold the cows off one truck at a time for six years. I was a kid and I watched him do it. I’m not watching that happen to you with a tractor sitting in the shed worth sixty-five hundred.”

I want to be fair to Kyle, because I have had a long time to think about that morning, and I believe he meant what he said. He was scared.

He had sat in that ICU and heard a doctor say his father might not be the same man, and the only thing in the world he knew how to do with fear was put a dollar figure on it.

But he had also said, before you spend it. He had said it to the woman who had been married to his father for fourteen years and had never once given him a reason to say it. Fear explains a lot. It doesn’t explain everything.

“Your dad has Medicare, Kyle,” I said. “And I signed him up for a supplement in January. I filled out the forms at that kitchen table. Most of this is covered.”

“Most,” he said. “Most isn’t all. And what about rehab, and a nurse, and the hundred things they don’t tell you about? You’ll be glad for that money in a year. You’ll thank me.”

“That tractor isn’t money,” I said. “It’s six winters. It’s your boys on that drawbar in the parade. It’s the thing he was going to teach Tyler on this summer.”

He flinched at Tyler’s name. Then he looked away toward the machinery row. “Dad’s not teaching anybody to drive anything this summer,” he said quietly. “Go home, Linda. Let me handle this.”

I didn’t go home. I went and stood by the wagon and watched the sale come down the row toward lot 40.

Dale worked fast. He always did. He stood up on that flat hay wagon in his cowboy hat and his quilted vest with the microphone in his hand, and his ringmen called the bids from the crowd, and the lots went one after another.

A disk for twenty-two hundred. A drill for thirty-one. A pile of gates for three-forty.

I could see Kyle at the back of the crowd with his coffee, and I could see Merle Tschetter in his feed cap standing near the front, not bidding on anything.

The crowd had grown. Dale’s people would say later there were close to three hundred bidders registered that morning, more than he usually got, on account of the rain keeping everybody out of the field.