Four Winters
He put it in the machine shed, the long one with the dirt floor, and he hung a work light from the rafter and set his woodstove going in the corner. That was November. He worked on it every day it was too cold to do anything else.
Mom had been gone two years by then. I think people do not understand what a long winter is for a widower on a farm. The cattle are sold. The ground is rented out. The house is quiet in a way that presses on you.
The machine gave him somewhere to be at seven in the morning.
He took every board off and laid it on the floor in order, like a puzzle. He measured each one and wrote the numbers on a feed sack with a carpenter’s pencil. Then he went to a sawmill two counties over and bought white oak.
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He cut the new boards on his table saw. He planed them by hand where the saw left a ridge. He fitted them with the old bolts where the old bolts were good, and with new carriage bolts where they were not.
The bearings were the worst. The old babbitt was cracked and gone. Dad had not poured babbitt since he was a young man helping his own father. He bought a ladle and a little pot and melted the metal on a camp burner in the shed.
I came out one Saturday and found him with the shaft blocked up and clay packed around the ends, pouring that silver metal in a thin, steady stream. His hand did not shake one bit.
“Where’d you learn that?” I asked.
“Same place you learned to pull a lever,” he said. “Watching.”
I work the parts counter at the implement dealership in town. I have for nineteen years. I know a part number when I hear one. So I ordered what I could for him: belting, grease fittings, a set of new sieves that came close enough, a bearing for the fan shaft.
Some things you cannot order for a 1928 machine. Those, he made.
The second winter he rebuilt the feeder and the straw rack. The third winter he did the cylinder, setting every tooth and turning it by hand, listening for a rub. The fourth winter he painted it.
Red on the body. Yellow on the trim. He mixed the colors himself to match a chip of the old paint he had found under a bolt plate, where the sun had never reached.
“Grandpa’s was this red,” he told me. “I’m sure of it.”
When the last coat dried, he stood in the shed door in the March sun and looked at it for a long time. Then he went in and called me again.
“She’s done,” he said.
That was all. But I knew what it meant.