Main Street
The parade started at ten. The band went first, then the fire trucks, then the homecoming court. The freshmen, sophomores, and juniors went next, each on a flatbed behind a pickup.
Then it was our turn.
Dad put the Farmall in first gear. He eased the throttle back until the engine was just above idle, a low, steady putt-putt-putt you could feel in your chest. He let the clutch out slow.
The tractor rolled forward at a walk. The hay wagon came behind it, and the grandmothers swayed a little and grabbed the rail, and the twenty-two seniors fell in behind, and then we were moving.
We turned onto Main Street. The brick storefronts were lit up gold in the morning sun.
There were people on both curbs, two and three deep, in lawn chairs and on blankets and standing with coffee cups.
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I do not know who started clapping first. It was somewhere in the first block, before we even got to the bank.
Somebody started, and then somebody else, and then it was the whole curb on both sides.
An old man in front of the drugstore took off his cap and held it over his chest. I did not know him.
He might have been one of the men who had a float of his own behind a Farmall in 1955.
A woman near the corner yelled, “That’s Elmer’s H!” and a few people laughed, and then more people were clapping.
Dad did not wave. He did not look at the crowd. He kept both hands on the big steering wheel and his eyes on the street in front of him.
But I was walking right beside him, and I saw him smile.
Kaycee walked on the other side. She had her hand up, waving to people she knew.
Every few steps she looked back at the hitch, and then up at her grandpa, and then out at the town.
In the second block, an old man stepped off the curb and fell in walking beside the tractor.
It was one of Dad’s coffee men from the café. He did not say anything. He just walked.
Then another one stepped off. Then two more. By the end of the second block there were four old men in seed caps and work jackets walking alongside the Farmall at a slow walk, the way men used to walk beside a team.
Nobody had planned it. Nobody said a word. They just walked with him, the whole length of Main, like an honor guard nobody had asked for.
The seniors walking behind the wagon saw it. They got quiet for a moment, and then the grandmothers on the bales started waving harder, and some of the kids started to cry a little, the way kids do when they are happy and do not know why.