The Float My Father Pulled Down Main

Why I Didn’t Fight It

People have asked me since why I did not just pay him the six hundred, or why I did not stand in front of his pickup and make him put the trailer back, or why I did not call somebody.

The answer is simple, and it took me about three seconds to know it, standing in that gravel lane watching the dust.

I had paid him. If I paid him again, I would be telling Kaycee that whoever yells the loudest gets the money.

I would be telling Lyle the lie worked. I was not going to teach either one of them that.

And if I fought him, out loud, on the phone or at the café or on Main Street, then the whole town would talk about Mack Sorensen and his brother-in-law for a month.

The float would be about Lyle. The kids would be a footnote to two grown men yelling.

Besides, there was the plain fact of it. It was the first week of October.

Every flatbed and every gooseneck in Valley County was hauling corn or round bales or cattle. There was not an empty trailer to be borrowed between here and Burwell.

So I did not yell. I turned around and walked back into the shed.

The Shed

The kids were standing in a half circle around the wreck. Some of the girls were crying quietly.

Some of the boys had their hands on their heads, the way boys do when they do not know what else to do with them.

Kaycee had not moved. I went over and took the staple gun out of her hand, gently, and set it on the workbench.

“Dad,” she said. Just that.

“I know,” I said. “Let’s see what we can save.”

That is all I said, and it turned out to be the right thing, because kids who have a job to do do not have time to fall apart. Within five minutes they were sorting.

The boys pulled the frame apart in sections. The chicken wire was bent but most of it was usable.

The cardboard elevator was crushed on one side, but one of the tall boys said he could rebuild it with duct tape and a broom handle.

The girls picked crepe paper up off the floor one strip at a time.

They smoothed it out on their knees and laid it in flat boxes. Some of it was torn past saving. Most of it was not.

The little wooden combine at the back had come through without a scratch.

One of the boys held it up and the whole group laughed, a shaky kind of laugh, but a laugh.

We loaded everything we could carry into the bed of my pickup and two of the kids’ cars.

It took about forty minutes. The sun was still well up when we pulled out of Lyle’s lane.

Kaycee rode home with me. It is nine miles from Lyle’s place to ours. She did not say one word the whole way.

She sat with her hands in her lap and looked out at the fields, where the combines were running, throwing dust into the light.

When we pulled into the yard she said, “He’s my uncle.” That was all. Then she went inside.