The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

“Fuel won’t be your problem,” he said. He looked down the road toward the highway. “I stopped at the mill on the way over to fill my cans.”

I did not understand what he meant by that until about 9:15.

The first truck was a white flatbed with a fuel tank in the bed and a hand pump, and the man driving it ran three ponds over toward Isola.

He was about Orrin’s age, with a sunburned neck and a cap from a seed company.

He backed up to my tractor without a word and topped off the tank, and when I tried to pay him, he waved me off.

“Ivy at the mill said you might need it,” he said, and that was all he said.

Ivy kept the books and the scale house at the feed mill, and she had known me since Boone and I were dating. When Thurman came in at 7:45 to fill his cans, he had told her.

And when Ivy knew something at the feed mill, every catfish farmer in Humphreys County knew it by noon.

The second truck was a farmer from up the Yazoo River road and his grown son, with two five-gallon cans of diesel and a cooler of water bottles.

The father shook my hand and then looked at the row of dead fish on the bank and shook his head slowly.

The third was an old man in a straw hat who must have been seventy, who drove up in a pickup with a fuel can in the passenger seat buckled in with the seat belt. He handed it to Roscoe and said, “Your granddaddy and I were in school together. Tell him I came by.”

Not one of them made a speech. Not one of them said a hard word about Orrin to me.

They just set down their cans, looked at the empty spots on the levee where my aerators should have been, and looked off north across the section road.

Every one of them knew. I could see it on their faces. Out here, a man can do a lot of things and be forgiven.

But taking a neighbor’s aerators in a heat wave is like taking a man’s well rope in a drought. Nobody has to tell you it is wrong.

At about ten, Nell drove out.

Nell Whitlock was Orrin’s wife, 65 that summer, a small woman with gray hair she still set in curlers every Saturday for church.

She had been married to Orrin for forty-four years. She was the kindest person in that family, and she was the one I had worried about most all morning.

She parked her car at the end of the levee and walked out to my tractor slowly in the heat, carrying a big green thermos in both hands.

She did not wave. She did not call out. She just walked.

I leaned down from the seat. She handed me the thermos up, and I unscrewed the cap and poured it. It was sweet tea, cold, with ice still rattling in it.