The Tractor My Brother Paid For

She said, “Don’t let it sit. That’s what he said to you from that bed, the last Sunday. I was in the room. I thought you heard him.”

I had heard him. I had assumed he meant the farm, which was gone, or the grief, which I was not carrying.

It was a Tuesday in April of the following year that I finally pulled the tarp off.

I started with the engine because that is where a machinist starts. I soaked each cylinder for weeks with a mix of automatic transmission fluid and acetone, a little pour every few days.

The pistons did not give. I pulled the head, which came off in two pieces because it was cracked clear through.

I stood under the shop lights looking at four pistons rusted into four sleeves like they had been welded.

I will not bore you with the work. It took three years.

I pressed the pistons out with a hydraulic jack and a length of pipe I turned on a buddy’s lathe in Decatur. I sent the crankshaft out to be ground undersize because two journals were scored.

I bought a sleeve and piston kit through a parts man at the Co-op named Vance Ottoway, who knew every serial number on every red tractor in Moultrie and Shelby counties.

I rebuilt the carburetor with a kit and a toothbrush, rodded out the radiator, and rewired the thing for six volts the way the factory had it.

I measured everything twice. Give me a bore gauge and a number and I will be patient for a year.

Give me a brother with his collar turned up on my front porch, and I am a coward.

Some evenings I had to stop and just sit, holding a connecting rod bearing. I thought of Durward at ten years old with his eyes the size of dinner plates after he put the fender into that barrel.

He was waiting for the old man to blow up. Instead Dad walked around the machine, looked at the dent, and said, “Well. Now it’s yours.”

I had forgotten that until one night with a bearing cap in my hand.

I never touched the dent. I hammered out every other ding, the hood and the grille, but the left rear fender I primed around and painted around.

I left it standing in the fresh red like a signature. Marcy asked me why. I said, “It keeps the machine honest.”

She looked at me for a minute and said, “You could call him, you know.”

I said, “I know.”

I did not.

The man at the sale

It was the second Saturday of September, three years and five months since I had pulled the tarp. The engine was together and the sheet metal was painted.

All I needed was a set of correct decals for the hood. Vance at the Co-op said a man out of Arcola would sell a set at the fall consignment sale on the fairgrounds.

So I drove into Kealor on a bright cool morning, the first morning that year it felt like October.

Dewey Quillen was calling it. He was seventy-one by then, a little stooped, his voice a hair lower than it used to be, but still that chant that makes a bid sound like a hymn.

I bought my decals for forty dollars. I was standing by the lunch wagon with a cup of coffee when Dewey came down off the flatbed at the break and walked straight at me.

I had not said ten words to him since the sale. I figured he wanted to talk about what I had said in that lot, and I braced for it.