The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

The tractor

Here is what you have to understand about that tractor.

Del Haugen, Merritt’s dad, bought that John Deere 4020 new in 1968, off the lot in Aberdeen. He was eighteen. He paid for it with three years of hauling bales and a loan from the old bank in Columbia that his own father had to sign for.

Del farmed with it for fifty-seven years. He had bigger tractors later, with cabs and radios and air conditioning. But the 4020 was the one he used for everything that mattered to him. Hauling hay to the cows in winter. Pulling the kids on sleds. Hayrides.

The Haugens gave a hayride every October for as long as anybody could remember. Church groups, Sunday school, cousins, the neighbor kids. Del drove. Myles rode on the wagon and told the kids about the homestead.

That was how it went. Del drove and Myles talked. Fifty years.

Del died in March, on a Tuesday, out at the bale yard, feeding cows. Merritt found him. He had climbed down off the 4020 to cut the twine on a bale and he just sat down in the snow, and that was that. The doctor said his heart.

After the funeral, Merritt’s mom moved into town, to an apartment in Groton by the church. She gave Merritt the home place and the cows and everything on it. That included the 4020.

But it had always been understood, without anybody saying it, that the 4020 was half Myles’s. Not on paper. In the way things are understood on a farm. Myles had driven it since he was thirteen. Del taught him on it.

Myles never married. He lived on the quarter next to ours, in the house their parents had built in 1951. He and Del had farmed together all their lives, his ground and Del’s ground worked like one place.

In the summer after the funeral, Myles would come over and start the 4020 every few days and let it run. He didn’t go anywhere with it. He’d just sit on it while it ran and then shut it off and walk home.

Merritt let him. I let him. We didn’t say anything about it, because what do you say.

When the 4-H club asked if we could host the October hayride, I said yes without thinking twice. It was a family tradition. I thought Del would have wanted it to go on.

I asked Merritt if I could use the 4020 to pull the wagon. He said of course. He was going to be in the field. I asked his mom. She said Del would have been tickled.

I did not ask Myles.

I thought about it. I want to be honest about that. I thought about it and I decided not to, because I was afraid he would say no, or he would say he’d drive, and I didn’t think he was up to it. He had been so quiet all summer.

I thought I was protecting him. I didn’t know I was taking something from him.