The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

Why

“It was 1883,” he said first. “Our grandpa filed the claim in the spring of 1883. He was twenty-two. You had it right the first time.”

“Okay,” I said.

He turned the cap around in his hands.

“Del bought that tractor the summer I was thirteen,” he said. “He came home with it from Aberdeen and he put me up on the seat before he even let our dad drive it. I couldn’t reach the clutch. He stood on the drawbar and worked the clutch for me with his hand and let me steer.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Fifty-seven years,” he said. “Every hayride we ever gave, Del drove and I told the story. Every one. I don’t think we missed a year. Not the year Mother died. Not the year we lost the crop to hail.”

He looked down at the cap.

“I heard at the elevator that the club was having a hayride at your place,” he said. “Somebody said, Kara’s going to pull it with Del’s 4020. And I thought, she didn’t ask me. And then I thought, she doesn’t need to ask me. It’s not mine.”

“Myles.”

“Let me finish.”

I let him finish.

“I came over that night,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just going to stand at the fence and watch. I thought it would be good to watch. And I stood there and I watched you drive his tractor out into the pasture, and it was all fine, and then you stopped by the old house.”

His voice went low.

“That’s where Del always stopped. That exact spot. Forty yards off, so the kids could see the corners. And you climbed down, right where he’d climb down, and stood right where I’d stand, and you started to tell it.”

I had not known any of that. I had stopped there because it was where the grass was shortest.

“And I couldn’t stand it,” Myles said. “I couldn’t stand anyone else on that seat without him. I couldn’t stand anyone else telling it. Not because you’d tell it wrong. Because he wasn’t there to hear it. And I wasn’t either.”

He breathed in through his nose.

“I don’t remember deciding,” he said. “I remember walking. I remember the pin in my hand. I remember being halfway to the gate and it was quiet, and I thought, I left them. I left those little kids out there.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I didn’t think I’d be any use to them,” he said. “I stopped in my yard and sat on that tractor in the dark and watched your flashlights come along the fence line. I counted them. Two lights. I couldn’t count the kids from there. I sat there until I saw them go in under your yard light.”

He looked at me then.

“That’s the worst thing I ever did,” he said. “I’m seventy-one years old and that’s the worst thing I ever did. And you’re standing in my yard asking me to drive.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

I had thought about the answer all the way across the pasture.

“Because those kids ought to hear it from the man who knows it,” I said. “And because Del’s tractor ought to have a Haugen on it. And because Gavin Becker’s grandpa is gone, too, and I think he ought to see a man come back.”

Myles didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he put his cap back on and picked up the maul.

“I’ll need to square it with them first,” he said. “Before anybody gets on the wagon.”

“That’s what Merritt said, too.”

“Merritt’s right,” Myles said. “He’s his dad’s son.”