The John Deere A ahead of us went two hundred forty-one feet. That was the best of the day so far. Gideon, the man driving it, waved his cap when they called the distance, and the grandstand clapped.
Then it was us.
I walked out and hooked the chain from the sled to the drawbar. I checked the pin. I checked it again. I stood up and stepped back and gave Grandpa a thumbs-up.
He nodded once. The announcer that day was a man named Purl, who has done the fair pulls longer than I’ve been alive. He has a voice like a church bass.
“Next up in the fifty-five hundred class,” Purl said over the loudspeaker. “Driving a 1948 Farmall H that he bought in 1961 and has farmed with ever since. Leroy Riese. Eighty-six years old.”
And the grandstand stood up. I don’t know who started it. I think it might have been the old pullers along the fence, because I saw them first. But it went up the grandstand like a wave, row after row, until the whole thing was on its feet.
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The old men in the pit took off their caps. Every one of them. Simeon came out of his little shed by the scale and took his off too.
Ward didn’t move. He stood at the end of the grandstand with his arms crossed, and everybody around him was standing and clapping, and he was the only one with his cap still on.
I saw a woman next to him look at him. I saw him take the cap off then, slow, like it was heavy.
Grandpa didn’t look at the grandstand. He looked straight ahead down the track.
He eased it into second gear and let the clutch out slow, the way he’d taught me to let a clutch out when I was ten years old on that same tractor, in that same seat, with his hand over mine on the lever.
The chain came tight. The sled moved. That little engine dug in. You could hear it change, the sound of it going from idle to work, a deeper sound, steady and even and stubborn.
I walked alongside at the edge of the track. I didn’t take my eyes off him.
The dust came up off the track so thick I tasted it. It hung in the air in the sun and turned everything gold. I could see Grandpa through it, his blue shirt and his cap, both hands on the wheel, leaning just a little forward like that was going to help.
The sled kept coming. Past a hundred feet. Past a hundred fifty. The front tires got light and lifted a few inches and set back down.
“Easy,” I said. He couldn’t hear me. I said it anyway.
At two hundred feet the engine started to lug. You could hear it. The rear tires started to spin a little in the dirt. Grandpa didn’t touch the throttle. He just held it there, steady, and let the old engine do what it was built to do.
Two-ten. Two-twenty. Two-thirty. The tires spun. The sled stopped. The flagman threw the red flag.