The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

Sixty

Nothing happened for about ten seconds. Ivan put one finger up and said, “Wait on it.” Then I heard the furnace click in the basement, and a moment later the blower came on, and the white plastic furnace vent on the side of the house began to breathe out little puffs of steam.

I put both hands over my face. I did not cry, exactly. I just stood there with my gloves on my face and breathed.

“Now come here and look at this,” Ivan said, and his voice was gentle, but he meant it. “You aren’t done. You’ve got to set her right or you’ll ruin your furnace.”

The generator had a gray box with two dial meters on it, one for volts and one for hertz. Ivan pointed his cane at the hertz needle. It was sitting at fifty-seven and wobbling.

“You want that on sixty,” he said. “Not fifty-eight. Not sixty-three. Sixty. Nudge the hand throttle up a hair at a time and watch the needle. When something big kicks on, like your well pump, she’ll sag a little and come back. That’s fine. If she sags and stays down, give her a hair more.”

I nudged the throttle. The needle crept up. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. The volts came up to where he said they should be.

Ivan nodded once and said, “There. That’s your spot. Remember where that lever sits.”

He had me take a wax pencil from his coat pocket and make a mark on the throttle quadrant so I would know it again.

Then he showed me the fuel gauge, the oil pressure gauge, and the temperature gauge on the tractor’s dash, and told me where each needle should sit.

“She’ll burn about a gallon an hour at this load,” he said. “The tank holds twenty. Fill her every morning and every evening and you’ll never get close to empty. I’ve got a three-hundred-gallon tank on a stand by my shop. Lacey can bring you cans.”

I said I would pay him for every drop. He looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language and did not answer.

The Seat

Inside, Lacey had already plugged the nebulizer back into the kitchen outlet. I could hear it humming through the window.

Maisie had her mask on and her horse under her arm, and she was watching Ivan through the glass like he was a parade.

When the treatment was done she came to the storm door in her snowsuit and asked if she could see the tractor.

I said only if she stayed with a grown-up and stayed away from the shaft. Ivan said, “She can stay with me.”

He climbed back up onto that tractor seat, slow and careful, one hand on the fender and one on the steering wheel.

Then he held his arms out, and I lifted Maisie up to him, and he settled her on his lap.

Lacey brought out the old quilt from our couch, and Ivan tucked it around the both of them until only Maisie’s face and his showed.

The engine idled steady under them. The generator hummed. The sun was on their faces.

I stood by the rear wheel and listened to an eighty-year-old farmer tell my daughter about the winter of 1949. He told her the snow came up over the roof of the chicken house.

He told her his mother kept the baby lambs in the kitchen by the cookstove.

“Did they make a mess?” Maisie asked.

“Oh, terrible,” Ivan said. “My dad was fit to be tied. But my mother said a lamb in the kitchen was better than a lamb in the ground.”

He looked over Maisie’s head at me when he said it, and I had to look away at the snow.

Maisie was not coughing. She was breathing slow and easy against his coat. After a while she fell asleep, right there on the seat of a running tractor, with her cheek on an old man’s chest.

Ivan did not move for forty-five minutes. Lacey offered twice to take her, and twice he shook his head. Somewhere in there he started humming under his breath, and it took me a while to place it.

It was a hymn we sing in our church most Sundays, the one about the old rugged cross.

When Maisie finally woke up, she yawned and looked around and said, “Mr. Rusk, your tractor is warmer than our house.” Ivan laughed so hard he had to hold on to the wheel.