The Pivot Gears He Never Changed

Because I was not the only one. I had heard it at church in the spring, in the basement after service, standing in line for coffee.

Orval Lindquist had said Russ was doing his wheel boxes. Jeanette Bly had said the same, and so had Cyrus, who farms the ground north of the river.

I called Orval first. He is seventy-one, and he has farmed the section east of mine since before I was born.

When my husband died, Orval combined our beans that fall and would not take a dime for it.

“Orval,” I said. “Did Russ put new wheel boxes on your pivot last winter?”

“On my west pivot, sure. Four towers. Eight boxes. Why?”

“Do they have fresh silver paint on them?”

There was a pause long enough that I could hear his screen door slap. “They do,” he said slowly. “He said he sprayed them to keep the rust off. Marla, what’s going on?”

“I need you to come over tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “I need you to bring your wrenches and your reading glasses, and I need you to bring Jeanette and Cyrus if they’ll come. I’m going to open every box on my pivot, and I want somebody to see it who isn’t me.”

“What time?” he said. He did not ask anything else. That is Orval.

“Two o’clock,” I said. “It’ll be hot.”

“It’s July,” he said. “It’s supposed to be hot.”

Tuesday morning Eli and I got started early on the work that had to happen before anybody came.

You cannot just open a wheel gearbox where it sits. There is oil in it and a drive shaft on it and a tire bolted to the hub.

We went down the line, tower by tower, pulling the drain plugs and catching the gear oil in a bucket. New boxes come filled with clean gear oil, the color of honey.

What came out of my boxes looked like chocolate milk on most of them. That is water, mixed in over years.

On tower three, the outside box drained almost nothing but rusty water and a little sludge.

Eli held the bucket up so I could see it in the sun. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

By noon we had the oil out of all fourteen and the cover plates loosened but not pulled.

Eli wanted everybody to see the gears come out at the same time we did. “So nobody can say we set it up,” he said. Nineteen years old, and thinking like that.

We ate sandwiches on the tailgate under the end of the span where there was a sliver of shade.

I had on a sleeveless gray T-shirt and jeans, and my old green ball cap, the faded one my husband used to wear. I do not know why I wore it that day. I think I wanted him there.

Eli was in a red T-shirt again, the sleeves already dark with sweat, and he had his good wrench in his back pocket.

At ten minutes to two, Orval’s pickup came down my field road with Jeanette in the passenger seat, and Cyrus’s truck right behind it.

Orval had his white straw hat on, the same one he has worn to every field day for twenty years.

Jeanette Bly is fifty. She runs two pivots on her husband’s family ground since he hurt his back at the elevator, and she was wearing a pink work shirt with the sleeves rolled.

She looked at me and then at the field and did not smile.

“Russ know you’re doing this?” she asked.