The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

“That’s what that can is for,” he said. “Things I want.”

While we waited on the parts, he did the valves. He sat on his bucket by the workbench with the head on a pair of two-by-fours and lapped every valve by hand with a suction-cup stick and compound.

His hands shake some now. Not bad, but you see it when he holds a coffee cup. When he was lapping valves, though, his hands didn’t shake. I watched for it.

Mallory took a picture of him doing it. She didn’t tell him. He’d have made her delete it.

June came on hot. The corn was knee-high by the middle of the month, ahead of where it usually is, and you could hear it in the evenings, but we were never out there in the evenings. We worked Saturdays, early, and quit by mid-afternoon.

That was Grandpa’s rule. He’d work until about two, and then he’d go sit on the porch. I think the doctor had told him something about the heat that he wasn’t going to tell me.

Sundays we didn’t work at all. Grandpa went to church at ten, same as always, and sat in the same pew on the left side where he and Grandma Mertie sat for fifty-one years.

I found out later that the pastor had put the H on the prayer list. Grandpa said he never asked for it. Somebody else did. I’ve always suspected Clarice from the fair table.

The parts came the second week of June. We set the sleeves with new seals, and I let Grandpa tap them home. He was careful. He checked each one with his thumb and then checked it again.

We hung the pistons. I torqued the rods while he read the specs off a shop manual so old the cover was held on with electrical tape.

“Your grandmother used to read this to me,” he said, turning a page. “When my eyes went, before the glasses.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She read it like it was a book,” he said. “She’d do voices for the parts. Connecting rod had a deep voice.”

I laughed so hard I had to set the torque wrench down. He was smiling at the page and didn’t look up.

The magneto was the other big job. That’s the part that makes the spark on these old engines, and his had sat so long the points were corroded green.

There’s a man in town named Verne who has rebuilt magnetos out of his garage for forty years. He did ours for eighty-five dollars and a rhubarb pie Mallory baked, and he wouldn’t take the money until she brought the pie.

“For Leroy?” he said, when we brought it in. “He’s going to pull that H?”

“In August,” I said.

Verne turned the mag over in his hands and didn’t say anything for a minute.

“I heard what Ward said at the table,” he said finally.

“Everybody heard,” I said.

“Well.” He set it down on his bench. “Tell Leroy I’ll have it by Thursday.”

He had it by Wednesday.