The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

Walking In

My friend Lacey from church lives two miles south with her husband and her four-wheel-drive pickup. I called her next.

She did not ask a single question. She said she would be there in ten minutes, and she was there in eight.

She came in the door stamping snow off her boots, took one look at Maisie, and said, “Okay, sweet girl, you and me are going to sit in my truck and listen to the radio and eat these crackers.”

She had a sleeve of crackers in her coat pocket. Of course she did.

The county plow had come up our road once on Monday, but the wind had been working on it ever since. Lacey’s truck could get through.

My car could not. We drove the mile north to Ivan’s with Maisie on the bench seat between us and the heater on high.

Ivan’s lane runs a quarter mile off the county road between two shelterbelts, and the wind had packed it level full.

Lacey stopped at the mailbox and said she would wait with Maisie. I got out and walked it.

I want to tell you about that walk, because I think about it still. The snow was crusted on top and soft underneath, so every step broke through to my knees.

The sun was blinding. My breath froze in the front of my scarf.

Halfway up the lane I stopped to rest against a cedar post, and I said a prayer out loud, which I do not usually do.

It was not a fancy one. I said, Lord, please let it start. That was all I had.

Ivan was standing in his shed door when I got there. He had his barn coat on over his overalls and a cane in one hand, and he had already pulled the big doors open and swept the snow back with a scoop shovel.

I do not know how long that took him. I did not ask.

The tractor was a red 1966 gas model with fenders and a wide front end, the kind that sat in half the machine sheds in eastern Colorado when I was a girl.

The generator sat on its own two-wheel cart behind it, painted yellow, with a steel tongue and a shaft that coupled to the back of the tractor.

“She’s been on a trickle charger, but the power’s out here too, so the battery’s down some,”

Ivan said. “We’ll jump her off my pickup. Back it in there for me, would you? Keys are in it.”

Starting Her Up

I backed his pickup up to the tractor’s nose and popped the hood. Ivan told me which post was which, and I hooked the cables, red to red, black to the frame.

He climbed up on the seat himself, slow, one hand on the fender, and I did not try to help him because I could see he did not want it.

He pulled the choke, set the throttle a little open, and hit the starter. The engine turned over slow, like it was thinking about it.

Then it coughed twice and caught, and blue smoke came out of the stack and hung in the cold air.

Ivan sat there and listened to it for a full minute with his head tipped. Then he nodded.

“She’ll go,” he said. “Unhook the cables. Then hook the cart on and I’ll show you the shaft.”

The cart tongue dropped onto the drawbar and took a steel pin. The driveshaft slid onto the splined stub at the back of the tractor, and Ivan showed me how to pull the collar back until it clicked.

He made me do it twice to be sure I had it.

“That stub turns five hundred forty times a minute when she’s right,” he said. “The generator wants that and nothing else. Too slow and your furnace motor hums and runs hot. Too fast and you cook what’s plugged in. There’s a meter on the generator box. We’ll set it when we get there.”

He climbed down and got in his pickup and followed me out to the county road in his tracks.

He said he was coming along to set the throttle and nobody was going to talk him out of it.

So I drove a sixty-year-old tractor a mile down a drifted county road with a generator bouncing behind me.

Ivan followed in his pickup. Lacey and Maisie brought up the rear with the flashers on.

The tractor had a road gear that topped out around fifteen miles an hour, and I did not use it.

I went about eight. Where the drifts had crossed the road the front end pushed through them like a boat, and snow came up over the grille and blew back in my face.

I laughed out loud once. I could not help it.