They came over, one at a time, while we waited. They didn’t make speeches. They just came over and looked at the engine and said something about it. One of them, Merl, who used to farm east of town, knocked on the side of the block with his knuckle.
“Wet sleeves?” he said to me.
“New ones,” I said. “Whole kit.”
“Who did the mag?”
“Verne.”
“Then it’ll run,” Merl said, and went back to his own tractor.
Another one, Vester, came over last. He was the man with the scrap business. The man Ward had lined up to haul the H off for three hundred dollars.
He looked at it a long time. Then he looked at Grandpa.
“Leroy,” he said. “I’d have given Ward more than three hundred if I’d known what it was going to look like.”
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“It’s not for sale,” Grandpa said.
“No,” Vester said. “I didn’t figure it was.”
And he went and stood by the fence with his hands in his pockets, and he stayed there for the whole class.
The club lets each driver bring one man to hook the chain and walk the edge of the track. That was me. I had on an old gray T-shirt, and my short beard was gritty with dust before we even got in line.
Grandpa had on his blue chambray shirt, the good one, sleeves rolled to the elbow in that heat. And his white seed cap from the co-op, pulled down over the white hair Mallory had told him needed a haircut, and he’d said, “After.”
Mallory was up in the grandstand, about halfway, with the baby on her lap in a little sun hat. She waved. Grandpa saw her and lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, which is a whole wave for him.
The grandstand was full. It always is on pull day. Families with coolers, kids with lemonade, old couples with seat cushions they bring from home.
Then I saw Ward. He wasn’t in the grandstand. He was standing by himself at the far end of it, down by the fence, where the track bends toward the pit. His arms were crossed. His cap was pulled low.
He wasn’t with his wife. He wasn’t with anybody. He was just standing there watching his father sit on a tractor he’d called scrap.
I didn’t wave to him. I didn’t do anything. I just looked, and then I looked away.
They pulled in order of draw. We’d drawn ninth.
The weight sled is a big steel box on skids with a pan in front, and as the tractor pulls it, the weight box rides forward and pushes the front of the sled down into the dirt. The farther you go, the harder it gets.
The rule for the antiques was no faster than four miles an hour. That’s a slow walk. The idea is to see what the old tractors can still do, not to tear them apart. A man with a flag and a man with a measuring wheel watched every pull.