The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

The sun was sinking under a long gray lid of clouds along the west fence line, and the whole back pasture had gone gold. I remember that, because I remember thinking it was the prettiest I had ever seen the place.

I had the wagon stopped about forty yards from the old stone foundation. Twelve kids from the Prairie Clovers 4-H club sat on the bales in their bright red, blue and green jackets, and they were quiet for once.

They were quiet because I had just told them a real family had lived in a hole in the ground on that very spot. A sod dugout, then a claim shanty, then the stone house whose corners were still poking up through the brome grass.

I had climbed down off the tractor to point it out. I was standing by the hitch in my cranberry fleece with my ponytail pulled back, trying to remember the year.

“Was it 1883 or 1885?” I said, mostly to myself.

“You don’t know?” said Noel Miller, who was eleven and kept the club honest.

“I know it was a long time ago,” I said, and the kids laughed, and that was when I heard boots in the stubble behind me.

I turned around. Myles was coming across the pasture from the fence line on the east side, the one that splits our quarter from his. He was walking the way he always walked, a little bent, fast for a man of seventy-one.

Myles Haugen was my husband’s uncle. He was my father-in-law’s younger brother, and he had buried that brother in March, on a day so cold the ground had to be thawed with a propane heater before they could dig.

“Hi, Myles,” I said. “You want to tell them about the foundation? I can’t remember if it was 1883.”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at the kids. He walked straight past me to the back of the tractor and bent down at the drawbar.

“Myles, we’re only halfway through the ride.”

“Nobody asked me,” he said.

He pulled the clip off the hitch pin and dropped it in his coat pocket. Then he pulled the pin itself, and the wagon tongue came off the drawbar and fell into the grass with a dull thump.

“Myles, what are you doing?”

“Taking my brother’s tractor home.”

He unhooked the safety chain from the drawbar, let it drop next to the tongue, and climbed up the step onto the seat of Del’s old John Deere 4020. It was still running. I had left it idling.

I could have grabbed his arm. I could have climbed up after him. But I was not going to wrestle a grieving old man off a tractor in front of twelve children, and he knew it.

He put it in gear and drove off east, across the pasture, toward the gate in his fence line. He didn’t look back once.

The kids watched him go. Nobody said a word. The sound of that engine got smaller and smaller until there was only the wind going through the dry grass.