The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

The morning after

The next morning, Merritt got up at six like always and fed the cows with the other tractor. Then he came back to the yard, washed his hands at the hydrant, and walked out to his pickup.

“Where are you going?” I said. I was on the back step with my coffee.

“Over to Myles’s.”

“Merritt.”

“I’m not going to yell at him,” he said. “I’m going to get Dad’s tractor.”

I went with him. I didn’t want him to go alone, and I wanted to see Myles’s face in daylight.

Myles’s yard is laid out like every old yard in that part of the state. The house on the rise, the shelterbelt on the north and west, the steel bins, the old wood barn with the hay door hanging off one hinge.

The 4020 was parked out in the open in front of his machine shed. It hadn’t been put away. It looked like he had driven it in and climbed off and just left it there.

Myles was standing next to it in the cold with his hands in his coat pockets. He had the same coat on as the night before. I wondered if he had slept.

Merritt got out of the pickup and walked up to him. They’re the same height. Merritt looks just like Del did at thirty-four. I think that hurt Myles, sometimes, just to look at him.

“Uncle Myles,” Merritt said.

Myles didn’t say anything.

“You left twelve kids in the back forty with the sun going down. Ava was one of them. Gavin Becker was one of them. He’s eight, and his grandpa just died.”

Myles looked at the ground.

“Kara walked them home in the dark,” Merritt said. “Half a mile. Every one of them. Nobody got hurt, and that’s because of her and not because of you.”

Myles’s jaw worked. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

“I’m taking Dad’s tractor home,” Merritt said. “And until you square this with those kids, I don’t want you on our place. Not for coffee. Not for cows. Not for anything.”

I want to say that I stopped him. I didn’t. I thought it was right. It was hard and it was right.

Myles nodded, once. Then he took the hitch pin out of his coat pocket and held it out. The clip was still on it.

Merritt took it. He climbed up on the 4020 and drove it out of Myles’s yard and down the section line road toward home. I followed in the pickup.

In the mirror, I watched Myles stand in his yard until we were over the hill. He never moved.

The winter

Myles didn’t come to Thanksgiving. Merritt’s mom asked about him, and Merritt said he’d been invited somewhere else, which wasn’t true, and we all knew it.

He didn’t come at Christmas either. He had come to Christmas at our place every year since Merritt was born. His chair sat empty at the end of the table, and nobody moved it.

He quit going to morning coffee at the elevator in Columbia. That was the hardest one, Merritt said. Myles had had coffee at that elevator every morning at seven for forty years.

Everybody in Columbia knew why. It is a town of a hundred and thirty people. They knew before the last car left our yard that night.

I want to say something about that. I never said a word against Myles in town. Not at church, not at the post office, not to the other bus drivers in the break room in Groton. When people asked, I said he’d had a hard year.

Tiffany said worse. I don’t blame her. It was her boy.

The 4-H club met in November at the community hall in Columbia, and two of the parents said they did not want any more hayrides on our place. I didn’t argue. I understood it.

I just kept driving my bus route. Fifty-one miles twice a day. In January the snow came, and the drifts on the township roads got so deep I had to call the route in three times.

On one of those mornings, coming back empty after the drop-off at the school, I drove past the Columbia cemetery. There was a pickup parked at the gate. Myles’s.

He was standing at Del’s grave in the snow. He had shoveled off the stone with a scoop shovel. The snow was knee deep everywhere else and there was a clean square around Del’s name.

I didn’t stop. I don’t know why. I think it felt like walking in on someone undressed.

But I thought about it the rest of the winter. I kept seeing his face when he pulled that pin. It wasn’t mean. I had been wrong about that from the start. It was something else.