The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

Then he went to the panel on our power pole, opened the box, and wired each one back in.

His hands were shaking a little. He had sweat through his shirt. He did not look up once.

When the last one was wired, he stood back and threw the switch.

All three motors started up at once with that deep electric hum I had been missing all day. The paddles hit the water.

White spray went up across the pond in three places, and from the end of the levee, the old man in the straw hat gave his horn one short tap.

Boone walked over to his daddy then. He did not hug him. Whitlock men did not do that much.

But he stood beside him, close, shoulder to shoulder, and the two of them watched the water churn together for a long time.

“Your mama brought Marnie tea this morning,” Boone said.

Orrin nodded. “I know. She told me.” He paused. “She told me some other things, too.”

I never did find out what Nell told him. I never asked her, and she never said.

But I have a pretty good idea, because I have known Nell Whitlock a long time, and the quiet ones are the ones you listen to when they finally speak.

Roscoe had come up off the bank. He stood a few feet from his grandfather with the skimmer pole still in his hand.

Orrin looked at him, and then at the row of dead fish on the grass behind him.

“I’m sorry, son,” Orrin said. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“Yes, sir,” Roscoe said. Then, after a second, “Mama did most of it.”

Orrin looked up at me on the tractor. He took his cap off. It was the only time in eighteen years I ever saw him do that for me.

“Marnie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” I said. And I meant it.

I shut down our old tractor at 5:15. The silence after ten hours of that engine was so big it almost hurt.

Thurman shut his down a few minutes later, and Boone and Roscoe helped him unhitch the spare wheel so he could tow it home tomorrow.

At the end of the levee, before he left, Thurman shook Orrin’s hand. Neither of them said anything. Fifty-two years, and they did not need to.

The sun went down red over the beans that night, the same color it had come up that morning.

At sundown, the three aerators were back on my pond, all of them running, and Orrin had hooked up every one himself.

I checked oxygen at nine that night, and at midnight, and at three. It never dropped under 4.

We sold that pond in October, 41,000 pounds at a dollar ten, and paid the note with some left over.

Orrin bought two new aerators for his own ponds that fall, and he never touched ours again.

And every Sunday after church that fall, Nell brought me a thermos of sweet tea, cold, with the ice still rattling in it.