The Old Tractor That Kept Our Furnace Running

The Line Into Dusty’s Road

I found out later how the rest of Thursday went. Lacey’s husband was running a skid steer for the co-op that week, clearing drifts ahead of the trucks, and he told her, and she told me.

The crew finished the feeder by early afternoon and moved north. The last line they had to put back that day was the tap line that runs up the gravel road past Dusty’s house. Two poles were broken off at the ground there.

They set the new poles with the digger derrick and hung the wire and spliced in the transformer, and when they closed it in, Dusty’s porch light came on in broad daylight.

All six of them saw it. All six of them saw the yellow generator sitting on the porch underneath it, still hooked to an extension cord, a ninety-five hundred watt portable with my husband’s initials scratched in the frame.

Dusty came out on the porch while they were loading their tools. He waved. Lacey’s husband said nobody waved back.

Nobody said anything ugly to him either. They just finished loading up, and climbed in their trucks, and drove off south.

Those men had worked sixteen-hour days for five days straight. They had stood in snow to their hips to get lights back on for strangers. One of their own was still forty miles away doing it, while his wife ran his house off a borrowed tractor.

I think the quiet was worse for Dusty than anything they could have said.

The tractor ran through Thursday and through Thursday night. I filled her twice more. Maisie’s cough was almost gone by then.

She had found a way to sit at the front window with her coloring books where she could see the tractor, and she named it Lamb.

The Third Day

Friday was the third day of the tractor. It was clear and still and cold, and the sun came up over the snow so bright it made everything look new.

The crew came back up our road at eleven-thirty to work on the last stretch of feeder south of us.

I had a pot of chili on the stove, because I had been making chili for every pair of boots that came up that driveway all week.

I called down to them that there was lunch if they wanted it, and Wendell held up one hand and nodded.

There was no room in my kitchen for six big men in their gear, so we set up on the tailgate of Garrett’s old farm pickup in the yard, twenty feet from the tractor.

I brought out the pot and a stack of bowls and a sleeve of saltines. They sat on the tailgate and on overturned buckets and on the bumpers of their trucks, eating with their gloves off.

Maisie came out in her snowsuit and stood beside me and stared at all of them. One of the younger linemen, a red-faced boy not long out of lineman school, let her try on his hard hat.

It came down over her eyes and she laughed until she coughed a little, and then she stopped coughing and laughed some more.

That was when Dusty’s truck turned in at our mailbox.

I heard it before I saw it. Every man on that tailgate heard it too. One by one they stopped eating. Nobody stood up.

Nobody set his bowl down. They just watched him come up the driveway, slow, with the yellow generator strapped down in the bed of his truck.

He parked beside the porch and got out. He did not look at the tailgate. He let down his ramp and unhooked the ratchet strap and rolled the generator down the ramp by himself, which is not an easy thing to do with a two-hundred-pound machine on frozen gravel.

It was very quiet in the yard. The only sound was Ivan’s tractor running steady beside us, and the generator on its cart humming, and a spoon somewhere tapping the side of a bowl.

Dusty rolled the generator up onto the porch and set it right where it had been on Wednesday morning. He set the wheel chocks.

He laid the fuel cap on top. Then he straightened up and stood there on my porch with his hands in his coat pockets, not looking at anybody.