The Tractor Nobody Would Bid On

Then he sat up there with his feed cap pushed back and checked the gas and turned the switch, and the whole yard was so quiet you could hear him do it.

He pushed the starter. The M turned over once, twice, and caught. That old four-cylinder settled into its idle, ticking the way Gene loved, blue smoke drifting off across the muddy yard in the cold air.

I’ll tell you the truth. I put my hand over my mouth and I cried right there. Not loud.

Just tears. A woman from church came over and stood beside me with her arm through mine and didn’t say anything.

Merle backed it out of the row as easy as if he had been driving it for six winters himself.

He took it in a slow circle past the hay wagon, and then out toward the road, and the crowd stepped back to let him through.

And as he went past them, those men touched their caps. Not all of them. Not like a show.

Just here and there through that crowd, a man would reach up and touch the brim of his cap as the M went by, and then put his hand back in his coat pocket.

Kyle stood next to me and watched it go. He didn’t say a word to me.

Then he turned and walked down the road to his pickup and his empty trailer, and I watched him pull out and turn on his flashers and fall in behind his father’s tractor at about eleven miles an hour.

Dale picked up his microphone. “Lot 41,” he said, and the sale went on.

I drove home behind them. I stayed back so I wouldn’t crowd Kyle.

Two pickups going the other way pulled clear onto the shoulder to let us by. One man waved at Merle. Merle lifted two fingers off the wheel, the way he always does.

At our place, Merle drove the M right up to the shed and in through the door I had left open, and he set it down exactly on that clean square of concrete where it had been all winter, and shut it off.

“Runs real good,” he said to nobody in particular. “Gene did a nice job.”

Kyle had parked his rig out by the yard light. He walked over slowly and stood in the shed door. I was standing by the workbench with that folded rag in my hands.

Merle looked at the two of us, and then he climbed down very carefully and said he’d better get home to his dinner.

“I’ll drive you,” Kyle said.

“I’ll walk,” Merle said. “It’s a mile and I’ve done it before. You stay here and talk to your stepmother.”

For a long time after Merle left, neither of us said anything. Kyle stood in the doorway with the gray light behind him. I stood by the bench. The M ticked as it cooled.

“I sat in that room with him,” Kyle finally said.

“I heard what she said. I kept thinking, it’s going to be Mom all over again. Except this time it’ll be you getting the letters and the phone calls, and you’ll have to sell everything, and you’ll be by yourself.”

“I won’t be by myself,” I said.

He looked at me like he didn’t understand.

“I’ve got this whole county,” I said. “You saw them this morning. And I’ve got you, Kyle, whether either one of us likes it or not. You’re Gene’s boy. That makes you mine too, as far as I’m concerned. It always has.”