“You taught me how to pull this,” Eli said. His voice was shaking just a little. “The lockout first. Jack it and block it. Drain the oil before you touch a bolt. You taught me all of it, Grandpa Russ. I was twelve.”
Russ took the gear. He held it in both hands like it was something alive.
“I still want you to teach me the rest,” Eli said. “I don’t know the rest yet. I want you to be the one.”
Russ made a sound I had never heard from a grown man.
He turned away from us and stood looking out over the corn for a long time, with that old rusted worm gear in his hands, and his shoulders shook.
Eli put a hand on his back and just left it there.
I walked back to my pickup and sat in the cab with the door open and let them be.
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Through the windshield I could see the two of them out by the panel, and after a while Russ was pointing at something on the pivot point, and Eli was nodding.
By the weekend, Russ had driven every gravel road in the county. He went to Orval’s first.
Orval told me later that Russ stood on his porch and counted out the money on the rail, twenties and fifties and hundreds, and then asked if he could shake his hand.
“I shook it,” Orval said. “I’m seventy-one years old. I’ve been cheated before and I’ve cheated a man or two myself when I was young and dumb. You shake the hand when it’s held out. The Lord can sort the rest.”
Jeanette took her money at her kitchen door and did not invite him in. She told me she did not shake his hand and she was not sorry.
I told her she did not have to be. She said she would think about it by Christmas.
Cyrus took his money and said nothing at all, which from Cyrus is about the same as a long talk.
The man south of Gibbon was paid at the elevator, in front of the whole morning coffee crowd, and that one got around town by noon.
Russ did not hide from any of it. That was the part I did not expect. He went to the co-op at coffee time and stood there and let people look at him.
He went to church Sunday and sat in his usual pew in the back, holding the hymnal low.
Some people did not speak to him. Some people moved over a seat.
The old organist, who has played every Sunday since 1979, came down after the last hymn and patted his shoulder once and went back to her bench.
The boxes came into the dealer Saturday morning. Eli and I picked them up in my pickup, fourteen of them stacked in the bed on a pallet, factory gray primer, and every one of them with a stamp on the pad that said the current year.
Russ was waiting at the pivot point when we got back. He had borrowed a jack and a little tractor with a loader from Orval, since his boom truck was sold.
He looked tired. He looked old. He also looked, for the first time in a while, like a man who knew what he was doing.
“Lockout,” he said to Eli.
Eli walked to the panel, shut off the main disconnect, and put my padlock on it.