The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

“I’ll be out Saturday,” I said.

I want to be fair to my uncle, because he isn’t a bad man, and because the reason he said what he said was a real one.

Four years before, Grandpa had a heart scare in the hayfield. Ward found him sitting on the ground next to the baler, gray in the face, and drove him to the hospital in Sioux City himself.

They put a stent in. Grandpa was home in three days and back out to the shop in a week. The doctor told him he could do anything he felt like doing as long as he quit the cigarettes, which he’d already quit in 1979.

Ward never got over that day. Ever since, he’d been trying to take things away from his father, one at a time. The hay. The cattle. The pickup keys, once, which did not go well.

So I understood the fear. I’d have been scared too. But being scared doesn’t give a grown man the right to laugh at his own father in front of the men he went to school with.

That was what I couldn’t get past. Not the scrap man. Not the three hundred dollars. The laugh.

My own dad was Grandpa’s older son. He died of cancer when I was nineteen. After that, Grandpa sort of took me on, and I sort of took him on, and we never discussed it.

That first Saturday was the end of April, cool and bright, with the wind coming across the fields smelling like somebody’s anhydrous.

My wife Mallory came with me. She had our daughter in the car seat, eight months old then, and a cooler full of ham sandwiches because she knew Grandpa wouldn’t stop to eat unless food was put in front of him.

The machine shed sits west of the house, a long pole building with a dirt floor at one end and concrete at the other. The H was at the dirt end, where it had been parked since 2011.

It was dusty and faded, more pink than red, and the seat did have a mouse nest in it. Grandpa pulled it out with his bare hand and threw it out the door.

“First thing,” he said.

He walked around the tractor twice. He put his hand on the hood, on the steering wheel, on the left rear tire. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.

“I bought this from Gaylord’s dad in 1961,” he said. “Paid four hundred and fifty dollars. It was already thirteen years old and the best tractor I ever owned.”

“Better than the 1066?” I asked.

“The 1066 made me money,” he said. “This one taught me how.”

We pulled the hood and the side panels and took the head off that morning. The head bolts came out better than I expected. Grandpa had parked it with the oil changed and the radiator drained, which tells you everything.