The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

So I understood, sitting on that tractor, what had happened in his head. His own ponds had been sagging all week in the heat.

He had been up at three that morning, read his numbers, and remembered Pond Three. And he had decided that his fish came first.

I understood it. I did not excuse it. A man can be scared and still do something plainly wrong, and he had left his own son’s fish to die in the dark so that his would not.

By 7:30 the meter read 1.9 at the north end, where the wheel was running. That was better. But a twelve-acre pond is a big piece of water, and one tractor wheel cannot move it all.

At the south end, the numbers were still under one and a half, and the fish there were still piping.

Roscoe walked the bank with the long-handled skimmer and started pulling the dead ones out so the rest would not foul the water.

They were big fish, two and three pounds, the kind we had been feeding for two years. He laid them in a row on the grass, and I made myself count.

By eight o’clock there were 187 along that bank. That was close to 500 pounds, about $500 worth of fish we would never sell.

It made me sick. But I had seen what a pond looks like when it goes all the way, and 187 was not that.

At 8:04, I heard a second tractor coming up the gravel road.

It was Thurman. He was driving his own red tractor, which was newer than ours and had working air, and behind it on the hitch was his other paddlewheel, the good one, the one he kept for his own ponds.

He did not stop at the house. He drove straight up onto our levee and down to the south end, backed down the slope as neat as parking a car, and had his wheel throwing water inside of ten minutes.

Then he climbed down and walked the length of the levee to me in the heat.

“Thurman, that’s your own wheel,” I said. “What if yours go down tonight?”

“Then I’ll call you and borrow it back,” he said. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead with his arm. “Two wheels on twelve acres will hold you through the morning. Sun’s up now. The algae’ll start making oxygen by ten. It’s tonight you’ve got to worry about.”

He was right, and I knew it. The water makes its own oxygen in the daytime when the sun hits the green in it, and then the fish and the algae burn it all back up through the night.

The worst hour on a catfish pond is the hour right before dawn. The aerators matter most in the dark.

Which meant that if those three electric wheels were not back on my pond by sundown, we could make it through the day and still lose everything by the next morning.

“I’ve got enough diesel for maybe ten hours,” I told Thurman. “Maybe twelve. That old tractor burns close to three gallons an hour running that wheel.”