The Farmall My Grandpa Pulled at 86

We drove it around the yard, then down the field lane and back. The clutch was good. The brakes needed adjusting, and I adjusted them. The governor needed a little work, and Grandpa did that himself while I held the light.

On the second Saturday, he said, “Paint it.”

So we painted it. I took the sheet metal to a buddy’s shop and we shot it in the right red, the old red, and the morning we put it back together you could have seen that tractor from the road a mile off.

Grandpa walked around it six times. He touched every piece of it again.

“Gaylord’s dad would never believe this,” he said.

Then we weighed it. Antique pulls go by weight classes. Ours was the 5,500 pound class, and that means the tractor plus the driver, everything, on the scale at the fairgrounds the morning of the pull. Go over and you’re out.

The H on its own runs a good bit lighter than that. But Grandpa’s still had calcium in the rear tires from the sixties, and cast wheel weights on both sides. We took it to the co-op scale and weighed it with him sitting on it.

Fifty-four hundred and ten pounds.

“Room for a sandwich,” Grandpa said.

Pull day was the second Saturday of the fair. The antique classes ran in the early afternoon, before the big trucks and the modified tractors that pull in the evening.

It was hot and sunny, ninety-one degrees by one o’clock, with no wind at all. The kind of August afternoon in northwest Iowa when the air just sits on top of you and the dirt on the track goes up in a cloud every time anything moves.

We hauled the H in on a borrowed flatbed trailer behind my truck. Mallory drove separately with the baby and a diaper bag big enough to live out of.

The scale was out behind the grandstand, a big platform with a little shed beside it where a man sat with a clipboard. We unloaded and drove it up on the scale, Grandpa in the seat.

“Fifty-four thirty,” the man said. That was with Grandpa’s water bottle and the heavier shoes he’d worn. “You’re good, Leroy.”

“Thank you, Simeon,” Grandpa said.

Simeon leaned out of the shed door. He’s maybe seventy-five. He pulled in this class himself for thirty years, until his knees went.

“Heard you had some help,” Simeon said, and nodded at me.

“I had some help,” Grandpa said.

“Heard you had some advice, too,” Simeon said. He didn’t say from who. He didn’t have to.

Grandpa just nodded.

The line of antique tractors waiting to pull ran down along the side of the track. There were eleven tractors in our class. A couple of Farmall Ms that had been weighed in light, two John Deere As, an Oliver, a Case, and a handful more.

The men driving them were mostly like Grandpa. Old. Sunburned. Seed caps and work shirts. A couple of them had sons or grandsons with them, the way he had me.