The Tractor My Brother Paid For

Marcy came out to the shop in her barn coat with two cups of coffee and stood by the workbench while I opened the big door. The sun came in across the concrete floor and lit up the red.

The M sat there with the fresh decals bright on it, the steel wheels, the fender with its one dent. I checked the oil. I checked the water.

I set the choke and turned on the gas, put my left foot on the clutch, and climbed up onto that cold metal seat for the first time in seven years.

Clutch, gas, and don’t look at your feet.

I hit the starter. The engine turned over, slow and heavy and strange, the long grinding groan of cold iron, and I held it, three seconds, four, five. Nothing.

I let off. Marcy did not move.

I tried again. It coughed. One cylinder, then another, and a puff of blue smoke out the stack.

I pulled the throttle down a notch. On the fourth try the engine caught, all four cylinders at once, and the whole shop shook.

The sound went out through the open door and across the field like somebody had fired a gun in church.

I let it run. I let it clear its throat. The oil pressure came up on the gauge and held, the smoke went from blue to white to nothing, and the engine settled into that low steady chuff.

I had known that sound before I knew my own name. It was my father’s sound. It was every October morning I ever had as a boy.

I put my forehead down on the steering wheel and cried like a child.

Marcy put her hand on my back. She was crying too.

When I could talk, I shut the engine off and said, “I can’t take it to his door. Not like this. Not so he has to say it’s all right.”

She said, “Then what?”

I said, “The same place I said the other thing.”

The microphone

Hasselbring was clearing out his machinery that fall, and Dewey was calling the sale on the last Saturday in October, in the gravel lot beside our father’s old machine shed. It was seven years, give or take a week, since our farm went across his block.

I called him on Monday and asked for five minutes at the microphone. He did not ask what for. He said, “The break, around eleven. I’ll tell the crowd to hold their coffee.”

Vance Ottoway hauled the M out to the home place that Saturday on his flatbed trailer, and I rode along beside him with a manila envelope on my knee.

We backed it down by the lunch wagon, a few steps from where my father’s chair once sat, and Vance unchained it. A few men drifted over to look.

By eleven the lot held maybe two hundred people. I knew most of them by their caps.

Hasselbring, the young man who bought our home place, stood near the front with his two boys. It was his sale and his lot, and he had said I was welcome to it. Mavis Durkee had come in from the nursing home where she works now, still in her scrubs.

Marcy stood at my elbow in her good coat. The heavy man from Effingham in the green cap leaned against his truck at the edge of the crowd with his arms folded.