The Tractor My Brother Paid For

“Fenton,” he said. “You still got that M?”

“I’m putting her back together.”

“I heard.” He took off his cap and rubbed his forehead. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for going on seven years. I promised somebody I wouldn’t. I’ve decided the promise was wrong.”

I set my coffee down on a hay bale.

Dewey said, “Your brother came to my truck at six-thirty the morning of that sale. Before the crowd. He had a Folgers can with him, one of those red cans.”

He said, “He handed it to me and said, ‘Dewey, this is twenty-nine hundred dollars. I want you to put my number on a card.'”

“I don’t”

“Let me finish, son.” He drew a breath. “He’d been talking to the Effingham man at the feed store the week before. He knew exactly what that fellow was after. Red M’s, parts and export.”

“Durward said, ‘He’ll take Dad’s tractor to a salvage yard and it’ll be in three states by Christmas.'”

“And he said, ‘My brother’s coming from Decatur. He wants it. He’s wanted it since he was nine years old. But he’ll be late, because he’s always late when it matters, and I need somebody to keep that man off it till he gets here.'”

I could not feel my hands.

“I moved the order up for the rain,” Dewey said. “I should have called you, I know that. By the time I put that M on the block it was a quarter past eleven and you weren’t there.”

“So your brother bid. He bid on it for you. Every time that Effingham man went up a hundred, he went up a hundred.”

“He’d already told me, in the truck, ‘If I’m still holding it when my brother shows up, I’m out. He’d rather pay for it himself than owe me, Dewey. I know him.’ I’ve thought about that sentence a hundred times, because he was right.”

“Where did he get twenty-nine hundred dollars?” I said. It was a stupid question. It was the only one that would come.

Dewey looked at the ground. “He sold his grain drill to a man in Mattoon. He sold a deer rifle his granddad left him. And Lorene’s mother’s piano.”

He stopped. “Lorene’s the one who told him to do it. She’d have sold the house.”

“When you put your hand up,” Dewey said, “he looked right at you. I watched him do it. He looked at you in your work coat with your hand in the air, and I swear to God the man smiled. A little one.”

“He put that card in his pocket, and I handed him back the can with every dollar still in it. He never bought a thing. You paid three thousand. He’d have paid twenty-nine hundred and handed you the keys.”

I said, “But I said”

“I know what you said. I was there.” He put his cap back on.

“He told me afterward, ‘Don’t ever tell him what was in the can.’ I swore it on my own mother’s Bible. I said, ‘Durward, why?’ And he said, ‘Because he’d feel bad.'”

Dewey shook his head. “I tried once. I came down to the church basement the day of the funeral lunch and you went out the side door. I wrote you a letter that week and burned it in the stove.”

“A man who swears on a Bible ought to keep it, and I told myself that was all it was. It was cowardice, Fenton, same as yours. I’m sorry.”