The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

I want to be fair to him, and that is as fair as I can get.

Garrett had been gone since Saturday night. The storm came through overnight Friday into Saturday with eighteen inches of snow and wind that drifted it six feet deep against every fence line between Limon and the Kansas border. It snapped poles like kindling.

By Saturday afternoon the co-op had three hundred miles of line on the ground. Garrett kissed us both at the door with his hard hat under his arm and said he would see us when he saw us.

He had been working sixteen-hour shifts ever since and sleeping in a motel in town for six hours at a time.

He had run our house on that generator for four days by phone, more or less. Before he left he showed me the transfer switch again, the one he had put in himself beside the breaker panel, and made me say it back to him.

Main breaker off. Switch to generator. Never plug anything into the house any other way.

That was the rule he cared about most. A man who climbs poles for a living has stood under too many lines that some homeowner backfed with a cord and a cheater plug.

It can kill a lineman who thinks the wire is dead.

So now the transfer switch sat on the wall doing nothing, the heavy black cord lay coiled on the porch where Dusty had dropped it, and the thermostat in the hall said sixty-one. It was fourteen degrees outside.

Why I Did Not Wait

I know what some people would say. Call the sheriff. Call Garrett. Make Dusty bring it back.

I did call Garrett, standing in the kitchen with my coat still on, and it rang until it went to voicemail.

He called me back nineteen minutes later. I could hear the wind on his end and the diesel of the bucket truck running.

He was on the highway east of Hugo, forty miles from home, with a three-phase line lying across two lanes and a state trooper holding traffic.

I told him what Dusty did. There was a long quiet. I could picture him standing there in the snow with his climbing gear on, looking at nothing.

“I can’t leave this, Kenny,” he said. Nobody calls me that but him. “There’s two hundred houses on the other end of this wire. Some of them have oxygen machines. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” I said. And I did know. That was the whole trouble with being married to a man like Garrett. The reason you love him is the same reason he cannot come home.

“The sheriff will call it a family thing over a loan,” he said. “They’ll send a deputy out tomorrow if they can get one through, and Dusty will have a story ready.”

He was right. Out here the county has four deputies on a good day and they were all pulling cars out of ditches.

Garrett was forty miles away up a pole, and I had a coughing seven-year-old that morning, not a week to wait on a deputy and an argument about a loan. So I asked him what to do instead.

“Ivan,” he said right away. “Ivan Rusk has a power takeoff generator on a cart in his machine shed. Twelve kilowatt. He ran his whole place off it in the ice storm years back. That old red tractor of his will turn it all day.”

“Ivan is eighty,” I said.

“Ivan is eighty and smarter than the both of us,” Garrett said. “Call him. Same rule as before. Main off, switch over, then start it. Kenny, if he’s got any doubts, you wait for me. Promise me that.”

I promised him. Then I hung up and went to get my daughter.