The Tractor My Brother Paid For

Durward had rented another four hundred acres the winter before. He borrowed against the home place to do it and put Dad’s name on the paper, because the bank wanted the old man’s ground behind it.

I did not know any of that. By the time I heard the word “note,” it was a Sunday in October and my brother was sitting at our mother’s old table turning his truck keys over in his fingers.

He told me the bank was calling it.

I was furious. Not at the weather, not at the bank. At him.

I said Dad was eighty-three and had no business signing anything. I said a man who could not see a wet spring coming had no business farming other people’s land.

He sat there and let me say every word. He never once raised his voice.

The sale was set for the first Saturday in November.

The sale

Dad sat the whole day in that folding chair with a blanket and a thermos. Durward moved up and down the rows, helping a man load a gooseneck, pulling a tarp off a pile.

That is what he does with his hands when his heart is full. His wife Lorene kept bringing him a sandwich and he kept setting it down on a fender.

I got there late that morning, and no excuse of mine would have held up. I had a shift change at the plant and a meeting I should have skipped.

Dewey had told me the Farmall would not come up until after one. But he had moved the order of sale up to beat the rain.

It was nearly noon when I pulled into the lot. I could hear Dewey’s chant, that rolling singsong, from the far end of the machine shed.

The Farmall M, lot 214, was already on the block.

Let me tell you what that tractor was. Dad bought it in 1963 with the first good crop money he ever had.

He paid four hundred dollars to a neighbor who was going over to Allis-Chalmers and wanted to get shed of the red. It was a 1949, and it pulled everything our family planted for fifty years.

I learned to drive it at nine. Dad stood on the drawbar with one hand on my shoulder and said, “Clutch, gas, and don’t look at your feet.”

Durward drove it into a fuel barrel when he was ten and left a dent in the left rear fender you could put your fist in. Dad never fixed it. He said it kept the machine honest.

It had not run since the winter before, when a cracked head let rain run down the stack and the engine seized solid.

I ran from my car. Dewey was at twenty-nine hundred dollars and there were two men bidding.

One was my brother, standing close to the front with his card held low against his leg. The other was a dealer from Effingham, a heavy man in a green cap who bought old red tractors by the trailer load for parts and export.

I did not think. I put my hand up and shouted, “Three thousand.”

Dewey looked at me. I looked at Durward.

My brother turned and saw me in the back of the crowd with my hand in the air. Something moved across his face that I could not read then and can read now.

He lowered his card. The dealer shook his head. Dewey said, “Sold to eighty-eight,” and the whole world went quiet.