The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

Two Days

Garrett called that afternoon while the sun was still high. I held the phone out toward the tractor so he could hear it.

He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “That’s Ivan’s old red one. I’d know that motor anywhere.”

“He set the throttle,” I said. “He showed me the hertz needle. It’s on sixty. The furnace is running. The well’s running. Maisie’s asleep in her own bed with the door open.”

“Main breaker off?” he asked, and I told him yes, and he let out a breath I could hear forty miles away.

Then he said he loved me and had to go, because there was a pole down on a section road and four ranches behind it.

Lacey drove Ivan home before suppertime, with the sun going orange over the shelterbelts. Before he got in her truck he walked over and laid his gloved hand on the tractor fender for a second, the way you would on a horse.

Then he told me again: morning and evening, and watch your needle.

That was the first day. The tractor ran all night, and I got up twice to look out at it from the window and see the little red light on the generator box glowing steady.

I slept in the recliner with my coat over me and my phone in my hand.

Thursday morning I filled the tank from the cans Lacey had left on our porch. I stood on the drawbar beside the cart tongue to reach the fuel cap, and I poured slow so I would not slop gas on the hot engine. I checked my needle. Sixty.

The co-op crew came up our road around ten. There were six of them that day in two bucket trucks and a digger derrick, working the feeder line that runs along the section road a mile south of us.

They stopped at the end of our driveway when they heard the tractor.

The foreman, Wendell, has been on that crew since before Garrett. He walked up the driveway with his hard hat pushed back and looked at the tractor and the cart and the black cord running into the house, and then he looked at me.

“Is that Ivan Rusk’s outfit?” he asked.

I said it was. He walked around it once. He checked my cord at the inlet box, and he looked at the hertz meter, and he went down in the basement with me and looked at the transfer switch with a flashlight. Then he came back up and nodded.

“That’s hooked up right,” he said. “Better than half the ones I see.” Then he paused. “Where’s that new one Garrett got last winter? The yellow ninety-five hundred?”

I could have told him a long story. I just said, “Dusty came and got it yesterday morning. He said it was his till it’s paid off.”

Wendell did not say a word. He looked down the road toward the north, where Dusty’s place sits off a gravel road three miles up.

Then he thanked me for the coffee I had not offered him yet, and went back down to his trucks.