The Tractor My Brother Paid For

I said it loud enough for the lunch wagon to hear.

That is the part I would take back if a man could take back one sentence out of a whole life.

I was fifty-one years old, standing in a gravel lot beside our father’s machine shed in my good work coat. I held a white bidder card with the number 88 on it.

I had just paid three thousand dollars for a rusted Farmall M that had not turned over in a year.

My brother Durward was ten feet away with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes on his boots. And I said, “You lost him the farm, and you couldn’t even keep him a tractor.”

Half of Kealor, Illinois, heard it. Dewey Quillen, who had just called the sale, heard it from the back of the flatbed.

Our father heard it too, from his folding chair by the machine shed. Somebody had set him there with a blanket across his knees so he could watch his own life get sold off one lot at a time.

Durward did not say anything back. He looked up once, not at me, at Dad.

Then he walked to his truck and drove out of the lot slow, the way you drive out of a funeral.

I did not have a real word with my brother again for almost seven years. I know how long it was because I have had a long time to count.

I did not come out of this looking good, and I want you to know that before you start.

Here is how it happened. And here is what I learned three years into a farm shop, with a micrometer in my hand, that turned the whole story over like a spade turns a field.

The place

Our father, Orville Marsh, farmed two hundred and forty acres four miles north of Kealor for fifty-three years. Corn and beans, and a few Hereford cows my mother kept because she liked their faces.

He wore the same Co-op cap so long the bill went soft and curved down like a roof. He did not say much. When he was proud of you, he handed you a wrench.

I am the older boy, fifty-eight now. Durward is three years behind me.

At eighteen I went to Decatur and learned to be a machinist. For thirty-one years I made parts for other people’s machines, measuring in ten-thousandths of an inch.

I went home every night to a brick ranch house with my wife Marcy and a lawn I never let get past three inches.

Durward stayed. He took the tractor seat when Dad’s knees quit and had mud on him from March to December.

For most of our grown lives I thought of that as a small thing to have chosen. I let him know it, the way older brothers do.

I did it with a look across the table at Thanksgiving. I did it with a little too much patience in my voice when he talked about the price of beans.

I want to be plain about that. I looked down on my brother for staying. I had a pension and a boat, and he had dirt and a note at the bank.

Somewhere in me I had decided that made him the lesser man. I never said so. I did not have to.

Then came the wet year. It rained from April into June and the ground never took a planter.