The Pivot Gears He Never Changed

“Fourteen boxes,” Eli said when he had finished tower seven, at the end of the span.

He stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Fourteen boxes, fourteen stamps. Every one of them says oh-nine. Not one of them was ever changed.”

Orval looked at the gears lying on the cover plates in the dirt.

He picked one up, a worm off tower six, turned it over, and then held it out to me. I shook my head. He kept it.

“I’ve got four towers on my west pivot,” he said. “Eight boxes. And I’ve got a wrench in the truck. I think I’ll go home and open my own.”

“I’ll help you,” Eli said.

“No, son,” Orval said. “You stay with your mother. I’ve been doing this since before your granddad bought his first truck. I know how to drain a gearbox.”

He walked back out of the corn. Jeanette went with him, and Cyrus followed in his own truck, and I stood at tower seven in the dry dirt and watched their dust go up the field road toward Orval’s place.

Eli came and stood beside me. He was holding the last gear from tower seven, the inside box, wiping it with his rag over and over, though there was nothing left on it to wipe.

“He taught me how to do this,” he said. “Every single thing I did today, he taught me. The lockout. The jack. Which bolt comes out first. I don’t understand it, Mom.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

Orval called at a quarter to five that afternoon. I was sitting on the porch step again, the old gears in a five-gallon bucket at my feet, the sun still high and hot over the windbreak.

“Eight for eight,” he said. His voice was flat. “Fresh paint over every one of them. Every stamp says oh-six. That’s the year I put that pivot in. Same as yours, Marla. Not one of them is new.”

“I’m sorry, Orval.”

“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do it.” He was quiet a moment. “Jeanette’s boy is opening hers right now. Cyrus went home to do his. I’ll tell you something else, too. My wife’s crying in the kitchen, and it isn’t about the money.”

I knew what he meant. Russ had sat at their table. He had eaten at their potlucks.

He had sung in the back row of the same church on Sunday mornings, holding the hymnal down low because he never could read the small print.

Jeanette called at six. Twenty-two boxes, every one original, every one painted. Cyrus did not call.

He drove over instead and stood in my yard with his cap in his hand and said, “Six boxes. Same.” Then he got back in his truck and went home.

I did not call Russ that night. I did not drive to Mom’s.

I sat at the kitchen table with Eli, eating cold chicken out of the container, and neither of us said much. The sun went down around nine, and I went to bed.

Wednesday morning, I went to see my mother. I went early, while it was still cool, because I knew Russ would be gone to his first service call by seven. He always was.

Mom was in her chair by the window in the house in town, with her Bible on the little table and her walker parked beside her.

She was wearing the blue housecoat I gave her two Christmases ago. She looked up when I came in and her whole face changed.