The Float My Father Pulled Down Main

Saturday Morning

Saturday came up sunny and cold. There was frost on the windshields at six and a clean blue sky by eight, the kind of October morning you only get in Nebraska, where the air smells like corn dust and woodsmoke.

The parade lined up at nine thirty at the fairgrounds.

The band was there, and the fire trucks, and the homecoming court in convertibles, and the Shriners, and every class float from the freshmen on up.

Dad had driven the Farmall over from my place at eight. He had washed it Friday after the kids left.

I had seen him out there with a bucket and a brush in the last of the daylight, going over every inch of red paint like it was a Sunday car.

He was wearing his tan Carhartt jacket and his seed cap. His white hair stuck out from under the back of it.

He had shaved, and he smelled like the same aftershave he has worn since I was a boy.

The grandmothers climbed up on the rack one at a time, the ones who had stayed up nights cutting crepe paper. They sat on the neighbor’s straw bales.

One held the pipe rail Gus had welded. The seniors lined up behind the wagon in the blue class T-shirts they had ordered in August.

Kaycee wore hers too. She was not riding. As float chair, she had decided she would walk beside the tractor the whole way, to keep an eye on the hitch and her grandmother and her grandpa.

She had her long brown hair pulled back and she looked about twelve and about thirty at the same time.

I walked at the wheel, in my gray hoodie, close enough to put a hand on the fender.

Dad had not asked me to. I just did not want to be anywhere else.

Before we started, Dad reached into the inside pocket of his Carhartt and pulled out a photograph.

It was old, the colors faded toward orange. He handed it to me without a word.

It was the 1996 float. The same Farmall H, bright from the paint job Dad had given it two years before. A hay rack full of kids in letter jackets, a little worn and a little proud.

And at the back corner, sitting with his arms crossed, pretending not to know anybody, was a skinny 17-year-old boy who was me.

And at the wheel of the tractor, a man of 49 with dark hair and a seed cap, looking back over his shoulder at that boy.

He was not looking at the crowd. He was looking at me.

I stood there and looked at that picture for a long time.

Then I handed it back to him, and he put it back in his pocket, and I put my hand on his shoulder for a second, and he let me.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said.

“Don’t get soft on me,” he said. “We’ve got a parade to pull.”