The Tractor My Brother Paid For

Dewey climbed onto the flatbed, took the microphone off its hook, and tapped it twice. “Folks, hold your coffee,” he said. “Fenton Marsh has got something to say.”

I climbed up beside him. My knees were not steady. My own voice, coming back off the machine shed, sounded like somebody else’s.

“Seven years ago this month I stood on this gravel and said a thing to my brother,” I said. “Most of you heard it. I said he’d lost our father the farm and couldn’t even keep him a tractor.”

Nobody coughed. Nobody moved.

“I thought I had bought that Farmall out from under him. I had it backwards. That morning Durward came to this man’s truck with every dollar he could raise, and he bid on that tractor to keep it off a salvage lot until I got here.”

“He sold his grain drill. He sold his granddad’s rifle. His wife’s mother’s piano went for it. He never spent a cent of it, because I put my hand up and paid three thousand dollars to take the tractor from the one man who was holding it for me.”

“Then I stood in the door of my own house and turned him away the night our father asked for him. He sat in the last pew at the funeral and none of us said a word to him.”

“I am not telling you this to be forgiven. That is Durward’s to give, and he does not owe it. I am telling you because every one of you heard me call him a failure, and he is the best man in this county.”

I held up the manila envelope.

“This is a bill of sale. The tractor is signed over to Durward Marsh, free and clear, every nut and bolt of it. Dewey and Vance have witnessed it. It is his.”

The man from Effingham pushed off his truck. He walked up close enough that I could see the gray in his stubble.

“Mister,” he said, loud enough for all of them to hear, “that’s the cleanest M I’ve seen in four counties. I’ll give you twelve-five cash, right now.”

“It isn’t mine to sell,” I said.

He looked at me a long moment. Then he took off the green cap and put it back on and said, “Well. I’ll be.”

Somebody started clapping, slow, over by the lunch wagon. It spread. I wanted it to stop. I did not deserve a minute of it.

Dewey put a hand on my shoulder. “Son, you want me to hold the key?”

I took the old square-headed key on its loop of baling wire out of my coat pocket. It was the same one Dad carried for thirty years.

I laid it in his palm beside the blue Pyrex dish. Marcy had scrubbed it and put a note in it in her own handwriting. I did not read the note and I did not ask.

“Give it to him whenever he’ll take it,” I said. “The tractor stays in my barn until he says where he wants it. If he never does, it stays there.”

“If he wants it hauled to a salvage yard, I’ll load it myself.”

Dewey nodded. His eyes were wet. “I’ll see he gets it.”

Mavis Durkee was waiting at the bottom of the flatbed steps. She took my hand in both of hers.

“He knew your brother came that night,” she said. “I told him at the end. I leaned down and said, ‘Durward was on the porch.’ I think he heard me.”