The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

The Car in the Driveway

Maisie was sitting on the couch in her pink snowsuit with three blankets around her, holding her stuffed horse by one ear.

Her lips were not blue, thank God, but she was breathing with her shoulders, and I did not like the sound of it at all.

I did not have time to cry and I did not have time to be angry, so I did neither.

I went out and cleared the snow away from the tailpipe of my car with my bare hands until I could see the pavement under it.

Garrett keeps a little plug-in inverter in the console, the kind you buy at the farm store for forty dollars.

I had never used it. I started the car, plugged the inverter into the lighter socket, and carried the nebulizer out in its bag.

Maisie sat in the passenger seat with the heater blowing on her and the mask on her face, and the little compressor hummed, and the mist came up white around her nose.

I sat beside her and counted her breaths and watched the house.

The car would run the machine. It would not run the furnace, and it would not run the well pump, and it would not keep a farmhouse warm through a fourteen-degree night.

I knew that, and Maisie knew it too, because she is a lineman’s daughter.

“Is Uncle Dusty coming back with it?” she asked through the mask.

“I don’t think so, baby,” I said. “We’re going to get another one. We’re going to get one from Mr. Rusk.”

“The tractor man,” she said, and she closed her eyes and kept breathing.

When the treatment was done I called Ivan. It took him a long time to answer, and when he did he sounded out of breath, the way old men do when they have walked across a cold kitchen to a phone.

I told him. I did not dress it up. I said Dusty took our generator and Maisie had a cough and Garrett was forty miles out on the highway.

Ivan was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Well, come and get it, honey. I can start her, but I can’t drive her down the road anymore with this hip. You’ll have to drive. Can you drive a tractor?”

“I drove a grain truck for my dad every summer from age fourteen,” I said. “I’ve never driven a tractor on a road.”

“It’s the same thing, just slower,” Ivan said. “Come on.”