The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

Grady

Now I want to be fair to Grady, because I have had a long time to think about him since that weekend.

Grady married my sister when he was 28 and she was 25. He drives a propane truck for the co-op out of town. He is good at it. He knows every lane in three townships and which farm dogs bite.

What Grady is not, and never has been, is handy. He cannot hang a door. He once put a lawn mower blade on upside down and could not work out why it would not cut.

My dad is the kind of man who can fix anything with a wire and a pair of pliers. And my dad is also the kind of man who does not say much.

The first Thanksgiving after Grady married Rhoda, the faucet in Mom’s kitchen started dripping. Grady said he would fix it. He took it apart, lost a washer down the drain, and flooded the cabinet.

Dad did not say a word. He went out to the truck, came back with a box of washers, got down on his back on the wet floor, and fixed it in ten minutes. Then he went and sat down to dinner.

Grady never forgot that. Rhoda told me once that he still talked about it. Not angry. Just quiet, like a sore tooth.

In thirty years I never heard Dad tell Grady he was proud of him. To be honest, I never heard Dad tell me that either. Dad shows you. He lets you pull the lever. He hands you the keys. That is his way.

But Grady did not grow up with Dad. Grady could not read him. All he heard was the quiet.

When the machine was finished, Dad needed somebody to haul it to the show. It was too wide for his own trailer. Grady has a long flat trailer he uses for hauling a tank now and then. He offered.

I was glad. I thought, here is something Grady can do for Dad that Dad cannot do for himself. Maybe it will help.

Grady chained it down on Friday. He drove it the six miles to the show grounds at twenty miles an hour with his flashers on. He backed it into its spot with only a little help from Wendell, who runs the grounds.

And somewhere in there, filling out the entry card at the show office, Grady wrote his own name in the blank that said Exhibitor.

I do not think he meant anything by it at first. He was the one who brought it. He was standing there with the pen.

But then on Sunday, Wendell handed him the microphone, and two hundred faces turned toward him, and for once in his life Grady was the man who had built something.

I think he just could not give it back.

That is his reason. I understand it. It is still not an excuse, because the man who had built it was standing at the rope twenty feet away and heard every word.