The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

The grease gun

Hoyt went for belts and chain at the farm supply in town. The boys went to work with rags and wrenches.

I opened the big toolbox bolted to the side of the frame to see what Daddy had left in it.

It was neat, of course. Daddy was neat. Box-end wrenches lined up by size. A coffee can of bolts.

A roll of tie wire. A pair of leather gloves gone stiff in the shape of his hands.

And on the bottom, lying on a folded shop rag, his grease gun.

It was an old lever-type gun, the red long since worn off the barrel to bare metal where his hand had held it.

On the side of the barrel, he had scratched his initials with a nail, the way he scratched them into every tool he ever owned.

I picked it up. It was heavier than I remembered. It still had grease in it.

I stood there in that shed holding it, and I could not have told you how long.

I could see him. Kneeling in the dirt by the right-hand wheel at six in the morning, working his way down the zerks one by one, counting under his breath.

He never missed one. He said a dry bearing will cost you more than the whole tube of grease ever did.

Clayton came around the end of the picker and saw my face. He did not say anything. He just reached over and took the grease gun gently out of my hands.

“I’ll carry this one, Mama,” he said.

He knelt right where Daddy used to kneel and started on the first fitting.

Getting it running

It took the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. Hoyt came back with two new belts, a length of chain, and a box of picking fingers.

The spring fingers in the picking cylinder are what pull the pods off the vines, and a dozen of Daddy’s had snapped or bent over the years.

Beau and Hoyt replaced them one at a time, lying on their backs under the cylinder.

Clayton greased every fitting on the machine. He found sixty-three and wrote the number on the back of his hand in ink.

They checked the tires. One rear tire on the picker had gone flat. Beau aired it up and soaped the stem and watched it, and it held.

We pulled the hydraulic hoses and looked for cracks and found one, and Hoyt had a new hose made in town.

We hooked our tractor to it at two thirty. Hoyt engaged the power takeoff slow.

The whole machine shook and groaned like an old dog getting up, and then it caught, and the cylinder came up to speed, and it ran.

Beau threw his cap in the air. I am not ashamed to say I cried a little, standing there in Daddy’s shed with my hands over my mouth.