The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

I drank the whole cup without stopping, and I had not known until that moment how thirsty I was.

Then Nell put her foot on the step and reached up, and I took her hand and pulled her up onto the step.

That old tractor had a fender seat on the right side, a little padded bench over the wheel, and she sat down on it beside me with her back to the sun, folded her hands in her lap, and looked out at the water.

She did not say one word.

She did not say she was sorry, or that Orrin was wrong, or that he had been under a strain. She did not ask me to understand him.

She just sat in that hot sun with me with the paddlewheel roaring behind us and the spray going up white in the sun.

After a while, I noticed her lips were moving. She was humming under her breath, so low I could barely hear it over the engine. It was “Blessed Assurance.” She had sung it at our wedding, standing at the front of the church in her yellow dress, the only one in the family who had cried.

I put my hand over hers on the seat. She turned hers over and held mine.

Her hand was small and dry and very strong, the hand of a woman who had raked dead fish off a levee the summer before and never once complained.

We sat like that for maybe twenty minutes. Then she patted my hand twice, climbed down off the step, and walked back down the levee to her car. She left the thermos.

I cried a little then. Not much. Just enough that Roscoe, out on the bank, looked up at the tractor and then politely looked back down at the water.

At 11:30, the meter read 4.2 at the north end and 3.6 at the south. The sun was burning down, the algae were working, and the fish had stopped piping.

We had lost 214 in all. Roscoe had them laid out on the grass in rows of ten, like he was counting money, which I suppose he was.

Boone pulled in at 12:50, still in his mill shirt with his name over the pocket. He had driven straight from Yazoo City without stopping for lunch.

He parked his truck at the house, walked up onto the levee, and stood there a long time looking at the three flat spots in the grass.

Then he looked at the row of dead fish. Then he looked at me.

“You all right?” he said.

“I’m all right.”

He climbed up on the step and put his arms around me right there on the tractor step, and he held on longer than he usually does in front of people.

He smelled like diesel and feed dust. I did not care.

Then he went and found Roscoe on the bank and put his hand on the back of his neck, and I heard him say, “You did good, son.” Roscoe just nodded and kept skimming, but his ears went red.