The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

He lined up the driveshaft himself, slid the yoke onto our tractor’s shaft, and pushed in the pin until it clicked.

“Run it at five-forty on the shaft,” he said, which was the speed those wheels were built for. “On that old girl that’s about nineteen hundred on the engine. Don’t let the paddles dig more than ten inches or she’ll lug down and you’ll just be stirring mud.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Marnie.” He put his hand on the fender. “Where are your electrics?”

I looked at him. I did not want to say it out loud, because saying it out loud made it real.

But Thurman had known my husband since Boone was in diapers, and he had known Orrin longer than that.

“Drag marks run north,” I said. “Toward Orrin’s.”

Thurman did not say anything. He looked off across the field toward the section road for a long moment. Then he picked his coffee back up and said, “Go on. Get it in the water.”

We were back on our levee at 6:41. I picked the north end, where the wind would carry the oxygen down the length of the pond when any wind came.

I backed the tractor down the slope of the levee until the drum sat right at the waterline, and Roscoe stood on the bank and hollered at me when to stop.

I lowered the hitch slow. The paddles touched brown water, then bit. I eased the throttle up, watched the tachometer climb to nineteen hundred, and pulled the lever to engage the power takeoff.

The drum turned. The paddles slapped the water and threw it up in a white spray across the pond, and the old tractor settled into a deep, steady roar.

It was 6:58 by the clock on my phone. I sat there with my hand on the throttle and finally let out my breath.

Then I climbed down off the seat and stood on the step with one hand on the fender, in the same faded maroon T-shirt and jeans I had slept in, and looked back at the pond.

The sun was low and gold over the flat fields behind us.

The spray was going up white in the light. The brown water around the wheel was boiling.

And along the bank, a few of the fish that had been piping had already sunk back down, which is the first good sign you ever get.

Others had not been so lucky. I could see the pale bellies of the dead ones turned up at the edge of the grass, and more of them still gasping where the moving water had not reached yet.

Roscoe climbed up on the step beside me. He did not say anything for a while.

He just watched the water churn, and I watched him, and his jaw was set exactly like his daddy’s.

“Did Granddaddy take them?” he asked finally.

I could have lied to him. I thought about it for about one second.

But he was fifteen, and he had seen the drag marks the same as I had, and he was going to hear it from somebody before the day was out.