The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

After

Nobody said anything for a while. Then Wendell let go of Maisie’s hand, and picked up his spoon, and said, “Ma’am, this is the best chili I’ve had all week,” and one of the other men said, “It’s the only chili you’ve had all week,” and they all laughed, and it was over.

They finished eating and washed their own bowls in my kitchen sink and thanked me one at a time on their way out the door.

Wendell was last. He stopped on the porch and looked at the generator sitting there.

“You going to switch back to that one?” he asked.

I looked over at Ivan’s tractor, running steady in the sun with the snow melting a little around its rear tires. “Not today,” I said. “I want Garrett to see it.”

Wendell smiled at that, which he does not do much. Then he went back down to his trucks, and by two o’clock they had the last of the feeder closed in south of us.

Our own tap line was still down at the corner, two poles broken, and Garrett had told me on the phone he wanted to put that one back himself.

I did not hear from Dusty again that week. I heard from Garrett’s mother, though. She called me Saturday morning in tears and said she was ashamed of him, and that she had told him so, and that he had come to her house and sat at her table and not said a word for an hour.

I told her she did not have anything to be ashamed of. I told her Maisie was fine. I told her the chair at Thanksgiving would still be there for him, if he wanted to come and sit in it. I meant that. I still do.

I will tell you the truth: none of those six men has had a kind word for Dusty since. He found work in the spring at a tire shop in Limon.

He came to Thanksgiving and ate his turkey and did not look at me much, but he brought Maisie a coloring book with a red tractor on the cover. I took that for what it was.

Garrett

But I am getting ahead of myself. The last thing I want to tell you about is that Friday afternoon, the third day of the tractor, a little after four o’clock, with the sun low and gold over the shelterbelts.

I had gone out to fill the tank one more time before evening. I was standing on the drawbar beside the cart tongue with a five-gallon can in both hands, pouring slow, watching my needle out of the corner of my eye. Sixty, right where Ivan said.

Maisie was at the window again, in her pink snowsuit, with her hand on the glass and her horse under her arm. Ivan had come back over that morning with Lacey, just to look at his tractor, and he was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and telling her about the winter the creek froze to the bottom.

Then I heard a truck on the county road, and I knew that sound too.

Garrett’s co-op pickup turned in at our mailbox. He had been gone six days. He came up the driveway slow, the way you do when you are looking at something you cannot quite believe, and he stopped where he could see everything.

He saw the old red tractor and the yellow generator on its cart and the heavy black cord running across the snow to the house.

He saw the other generator sitting on the porch where it belonged. He saw his daughter at the window and an old farmer in his kitchen with a coffee cup, and he saw the furnace vent on the side of the house puffing steam straight up in the still air.

When Garrett’s truck finally pulled in, the tractor was still running and I was standing on the drawbar.