The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

Ward nodded. His jaw was tight.

“I know, Dad.”

“And next year,” Grandpa said, “you’re going to hook the chain for me. Colton’s got a baby to watch.”

Ward made a sound that was almost a laugh. He wiped his face with his arm.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

Vester, over by the fence, called out, “Still don’t want three hundred for it, Leroy?”

And every one of those old men laughed, Ward included, and that was the end of it.

The two Ms pulled. One went two hundred twenty feet. The other spun out at one-ninety. Gideon kept first with his John Deere, and Grandpa kept second.

They gave out the trophies on a little stage in front of the grandstand at four o’clock. Purl called them up one at a time. First, second, and third in each class.

When he called Grandpa’s name, the grandstand stood up a third time.

Grandpa walked up to the stage, took the trophy from Purl, and shook his hand. It was a small trophy, about a foot tall, with a gold tractor on top and a plate on the front.

He held it up once, for the crowd. Then he came back down the steps.

Mallory had come down from the grandstand with the baby. She hugged him. The baby grabbed his chambray collar and wouldn’t let go, and Grandpa let her hold it.

Then he turned to me.

He didn’t say anything right away. He just put his hand on my shoulder, the way he used to when I was a boy and we’d finished a long day in the field. His hand was heavy and warm and it didn’t shake at all.

“You did good, Colton,” he said.

That’s all he said. It was enough. I had to look at the dust on my boots for a while.

“So did you, Grandpa,” I said, when I could.

He squeezed my shoulder once, hard, and let go.

The newspaper man from the county weekly wanted a picture.

Grandpa stood in front of the H, which was still dusty from the track and still about the reddest thing you ever saw. I stood on one side. Mallory and the baby stood on the other.

“Where’s Ward?” Grandpa said.

Ward was standing back by the fence. He came over slow.

Grandpa held out the trophy to him.

“You hold it,” he said.

Ward looked at it. He looked at his father. Then he took it in both hands, like it was something that might break.

“Dad, it’s yours.”

“I know whose it is,” Grandpa said. “Hold it anyway.”

So the picture in the county paper that week shows an eighty-six-year-old man in a seed cap and a blue chambray shirt, his grandson in a sweaty gray T-shirt, a woman with a baby in a sun hat, and a big sixty-year-old farmer standing in front of a red 1948 Farmall H with tears on his face, holding his father’s second-place trophy for the camera.