The Float My Father Pulled Down Main

The Hitch

The tongue on my hay wagon was a problem, and Dad saw it before I did.

The eye at the end, where the hitch pin goes through, had worn oblong over the years and there was a crack running out from one side.

“That won’t do for kids,” Dad said. “That’s fine for hay. Not for kids.”

He was right. I had pulled that wagon a thousand times behind my pickup at twenty miles an hour full of bales, and never thought twice.

But you do not put a wagon full of people on a cracked tongue.

I called Gus at nine o’clock from the elevator. Gus has a welding shop on the edge of town and has fixed every broken thing in Valley County at least once.

He was in my yard at twelve fifteen on his lunch hour with his rig.

He looked at the tongue for about ten seconds. “Cut it off,” he said. “New eye. Half an hour.”

He cut the old eye off with a torch and welded a new one on, inch-thick plate, and ground it smooth.

Then he welded two tabs on the frame for a pair of safety chains, because the Farmall drawbar has holes you can hook a chain through.

Then he stood back and looked at the rack and said, “Folks’ll be sitting?”

“Some of them. Some sitting on straw bales.”

“Then you need a rail.” He went back to his truck and came back with a stack of old pipe from his scrap pile.

He ran a waist-high rail around three sides of the rack and welded it to the stake pockets.

It took him until almost two. He missed his whole lunch and part of his afternoon. When he was done he packed up his rig and wiped his hands on a rag.

I took out my wallet. He looked at it like it was a snake.

“My granddaughter’s on that float,” he said. “Put that away.”

I did not know that. I found out later his granddaughter was the girl who had screamed when the frame slid off the trailer.

She had come home that afternoon and told him all about it.

Thursday

The seniors came straight from school Thursday afternoon. They came in their own cars and in their parents’ pickups and two of them on a four-wheeler.

By three forty-five there were twenty-two kids in my yard.

Dad was already there. He had driven the Farmall over at noon, the six miles from his place, at about fifteen miles an hour on the shoulder of the highway with the flashers going on a little orange triangle he had wired to the seat.

He had parked it by the hay wagon and backed up and hitched it himself while I was at work.

When I got home it was sitting there hooked up, red against the brown fields, looking exactly the way it had looked in 1996.

The kids went over and stood around it. Some of them had never been that close to a tractor that old. One of the boys asked Dad how fast it went.

“Fast enough,” Dad said. “Not as fast as you think.”

Then he showed them the gear shift and the throttle lever and the little brass plate with the serial number.

The boy asked if he could sit on the seat, and Dad said, “Go ahead,” and stood beside him with his hand on the fender like he was teaching a grandson.

Kaycee did not go over to the tractor at first. She stood by the hay wagon with a clipboard and her list, and she started telling people what to do.

She has always been that way. When something goes wrong, she makes a list.

They worked until the light started to go out of the sky. They rebuilt the plywood backdrop with new plywood I had in the shop.

The tall boy rebuilt the cardboard elevator, taller than before, with a broom handle down the middle.

They nailed the little wooden combine to the back corner of the rack. They set the bushel of corn in the center.

They laid out the chicken wire and started stuffing it with crepe paper squares, blue and gold, one at a time, the way you have to do it.

Jolene brought out sandwiches and a cooler of pop. She stood at the edge of the yard and watched for a long time with her arms folded. I went over and stood next to her.

“I called him again,” she said. “Nothing.”