The Float My Father Pulled Down Main

Dad

My father, Elmer Sorensen, is 79 years old. He farmed the same 320 acres east of town for fifty-one years.

He sold the ground to a neighbor when my mother got sick, and he kept the house, the shop, and one tractor.

The tractor is a 1948 Farmall H. His own father bought it new from the implement dealer in town the year Dad turned one.

Dad learned to drive on it when he was nine, sitting on a cushion so he could reach the clutch.

It is red, the old Farmall red, the kind you can pick out from a mile away across a field.

Dad repainted it himself in 1994 and touches it up every spring. He still starts it every Sunday after church and lets it run for twenty minutes.

Thursday morning at seven, before I had left for the elevator, Dad’s pickup came up our lane. He got out in his tan Carhartt jacket and his seed cap.

He had heard about it at the café, where he has coffee with the same five men every morning at six.

He did not come to the house. He walked right past me on the porch and went straight to the hay wagon parked behind my shop.

It is an old flat rack, eight feet by eighteen, on a running gear I bought at a farm sale twenty years ago.

I use it for small square bales in the summer. It had nothing on it but some loose hay and a pitchfork.

Dad walked around it once. He bent down and looked at the running gear. He kicked a tire. He looked at the tongue.

“Your class rode behind the H,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-six.”

I had forgotten. That is the truth. I had forgotten until he said it, and then I remembered all of it at once.

Our senior float, the fall of 1996. We had borrowed a hay rack from somebody’s uncle, and the pickup that was supposed to pull it had a bad water pump the morning of the parade.

And my father had driven the H in from the farm, six miles at fifteen miles an hour, and pulled us down Main.

I had been embarrassed. I was 17 and I wanted a pickup, not my dad on a tractor older than he was.

I sat at the back of the rack and pretended not to know him.

“She’ll pull twenty-two kids at a walk,” Dad said. “She’s done it before.”

“Dad,” I said. “Are you sure?”

He looked at me the way he used to look at me when I asked if a fence was tight after he had already stretched it.

“I’m 79, Mack,” he said. “I’m not dead.”