The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

Nothing. Not a card. Not a nod. The ringmen stood out front of the crowd with their arms half raised, waiting to holler, and there was nothing to holler.

“Somebody start me at a thousand,” Dale said. “Five hundred. Folks, I’ve got to have a bid.”

I looked at them then. I couldn’t help it. Three hundred men in caps and work coats, standing in that farmyard in the mud, and every one of them had his bidder card down at his side.

Just held down, the way you’d hold your hat in church.

Nobody said anything. Nobody cheered or clapped or hollered at Kyle. These were not men who made speeches. They just stood there and waited, and the waiting said everything there was to say.

I saw old Merle at the front with his card in his hand, and his hand was shaking a little the way it did now, and it stayed down.

I saw a man I knew owned three Farmall Ms already, a collector, the one man there who might have wanted that tractor most. His card was down.

Dale let it go a long time. Longer than any auctioneer ever lets a lot hang. I counted to thirty in my head.

“No sale,” Dale said finally, and he said it gently. “Lot 40 passes. We’ll move on to 41.”

But nobody moved on to 41. Not right away. The crowd stood there, and slowly, one head and then another, they turned around toward the back.

Kyle was standing behind the lunch stand. He had set his coffee down somewhere.

He had his keys in his hand, the keys to the pickup and the gooseneck he had hauled his father’s tractor there with, and he was holding them like he didn’t know what they were.

He had signed the consignment. The tractor was his to haul home now. Everybody in that yard knew it, and everybody in that yard was waiting to see what he would do.

And he had to walk through every one of them to get to it.

He stood there a long time. I could see his face from where I was, and it was not angry.

It was the same face I had seen at the foot of Gene’s bed when the doctor said the heart has been hurt. A boy’s face, really, on a man of thirty-eight.

Then he started walking. The crowd opened for him without anybody saying a word.

They just stepped aside, and he came through them with his head down and his keys in his hand, all the way up the row to where I was standing with my hand on the fender.

Before he got there, Merle Tschetter stepped out of the crowd. Merle is eighty and walks with a hitch from a hip he has refused to have replaced.

He came across the mud to the tractor and put one hand on the steering wheel next to the lot card, and he looked at Kyle, and then he looked at me.

“Linda,” he said, “I’ll drive her home for you. Gene wouldn’t want her hauled. He’d want her driven.”

Kyle stopped. He opened his mouth. Merle looked at him, not hard, just steady, the way an old man looks at a boy he has known since the boy was in diapers.

“You can follow us, son,” Merle said. “Put your flashers on. It’s four miles.”

It took Merle a minute to get up onto that seat.