The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

My uncle Ward laughed so loud at the fair sign-up table that the woman taking the money looked up from her cash box and stopped making change.

“That H belongs on the scrap pile, Dad,” he said. He was standing right behind Grandpa, reading the entry form over his shoulder. “And so does any man who’d pull it at eighty-six.”

There were maybe a dozen men in that line. Most of them were past seventy. Most of them had known my grandfather since before I was born, and some since before my dad was born.

Not one of them said a word. You could hear the flag rope slapping against the pole out by the livestock barns, and a pickup backing a stock trailer somewhere behind the sheds.

Grandpa didn’t turn around. He unfolded the form on the table, smoothed it flat with the side of his hand, and set two tens and a five on top of it.

“Antique pull,” he said to the woman. “Fifty-five hundred class. Farmall H, 1948.”

She looked at Ward, then at Grandpa, then back down at her pad. She wrote it in. Leroy Riese, age 86, 1948 Farmall H, 5,500 pound class. She tore off the receipt and handed it over.

“Thank you, Clarice,” Grandpa said. Then he put the receipt in his shirt pocket, behind his reading glasses, and walked out of that line like nobody had said anything at all.

I followed him. I’m Colton Riese. I was thirty-three that spring, and I fix diesel engines for a living at an implement dealer forty minutes up the highway in northwest Iowa.

Ward caught up with us at the truck. He’s sixty, a big man, built like his father was at that age, and he farms the home ground now. Grandpa rents it to him for less than he should.

“Dad, I’m not trying to be hard on you,” Ward said, in a lower voice now that the line couldn’t hear. “But I’ve got Vester coming next week. He’ll give three hundred for it as scrap.”

“It’s not yours to sell,” Grandpa said.

“It doesn’t run. It hasn’t run in years. It’s sitting in that shed with mice in the seat.”

“Then I’ll get the mice out of the seat.”

Ward looked at me like I was supposed to help him. I didn’t say anything. I’ll tell you why, and it’s the whole reason this story happened the way it did.

I didn’t fight Ward, and I didn’t go around him to anybody else in the family. It was Grandpa’s tractor. Grandpa was of sound mind and owned every bolt on it, and Grandpa wanted to pull. That was the end of it for me.

Ward drove off. Grandpa got into my truck and buckled his seat belt, which he only does when he’s thinking about something else.

We were three miles down the gravel before he spoke.

“Pistons are stuck, Colton,” he said.

I knew what he was asking. I’ve known that man my whole life, and he has never once in it asked anybody for help with a sentence that had the word help in it.