McCormick-Deering model 10-20

I am just a tractor, but I’ve seen things.

The farmer bought me in the spring of ’29. To him, I was a McCormick-Deering model 10-20, serial number KC11182, with 20 horsepower at 1,000 RPM and 10 horsepower at the drawbar. 

To my best friend, the 10-year-old kid, I was a Roman chariot, an Indy race car, and a Cadillac.

In that first week, the farmer showed him how to drive me.  It was rough.  The clutch/gear shifting thing was new to him.  In case you’re wondering, it hurts when someone grinds your gears.  You want to scream when they release your clutch too fast and stall your engine.  But he figured it out, and working with him became my pleasure.

We had a great time that first summer when we became a team.  After the school year ended, he’d think of any reason to drive me; we’d retrieve the mail from the box at the end of the driveway.  It would have been faster for him to walk, but we enjoyed these trips.  For the rest of that year, we mowed the orchard and yard, plowed the vegetable garden, hauled trailers stacked high with apple crates, cleared snow, and had a great time.    We pulled a wagon to the roadside on summer weekends and sold produce. The bigger tractor did the heavy work in the corn, wheat, and alfalfa fields.  I was strictly an orchard and garden kind of guy.  

I felt terrible for the horses I had replaced.  They stared at me with hate from the corral behind the barn; they wanted to work.  What can I say?  Progress sucks sometimes.

It wasn’t always ice cream with chocolate sauce.  Something called the “Depression” happened in October of ’29.  I’m no economist, but I knew we were hurting.  Prices fell to the bottom of the septic tank, and even then, people couldn’t afford our vegetables and apples.  The family didn’t starve; they were farmers, after all.   Mom canned what came out of the garden, and the pigs, chickens, and cattle provided meat (although they did not seem very happy about it).  Most of the clothes were homemade.  The whole family scrimped, even me. The farmer started filling me with kerosene instead of gas; did you ever try plowing fifteen inches of snow on kerosene?  I don’t recommend it.  He sold the horses to a slimy SOB. who converted them to dog food and glue.  I again thanked God I wasn’t a horse.  We all survived while other farms went toes up.

In February 1930, the farmer showed the kid how to tune me up.  He changed my plugs, oil, and filters, checked the timing, and cleaned and adjusted my points’ gaps.  From then on, the kid did all my maintenance.  In the spring of ’32, he rebuilt my carburetor because the kerosene gummed it up.  There’s nothing like a clean carb, believe me.

The damn puppy showed up in the summer of ’36.  What a damn mutt.  Now, it was the three of us.  It was OK if the damn dog ran next to me, but the kid drove with his new damn pet sitting on his lap.  I’m a nice guy, but if damn Fido ran into the road and bit a bumper, I’d be OK with that.  The kid loved the dog, so I had to deal with it; I’d always be his first love.

In the fall ’38, she appeared as part of the apple-picking crew.  She was a skinny one with brown hair in a ponytail and blue jeans and plaid shirts and sweaters her mom knitted and a sweet voice that sang songs she heard on the radio and a silly laugh and tennis shoes with holes and a little brother who bothered her and freckles on her nose and tortoiseshell glasses and a book of poems she read aloud while we worked and a lot of other things tractors and damn dogs don’t have. 

The kid got it bad.   For two days, he just stared like a dope, but he didn’t see that she was staring, too.  I knew when someone caught you looking at them, you caught them looking at you; eventually, these two would catch each other looking at each other.  I thought, here we go, the dog thing all over again.  It was worse.  On the last day of apple picking, she twisted her ankle and needed a ride back to the car.  If you ask me, she was faking it, but the kid jumped down and helped her climb onto my right fender so we could drive her back to the cars.  He put his arm around her waist.  That did it; the secret staring time had passed, and the talking and touching time had begun.  Now there was her and the damn dog in his life; it was getting crowded.  But I’ll always be his first love.

After all the apples were picked, she kept showing up.  One upside was the kid cared about how he looked and smelled.  No one complained about that.  When he worked alone, he read a book by some guy named Hemingway about a bell, another book about a guy named Gatsby by some guy named Fitzgerald, and a couple of books by a guy named Twain (what kind of name is that?).  The days when she wasn’t around, the kid moped about, even the damn dog moped.  I felt terrible for him (the kid, not the damn dog).

Then, in the summer of 1940, she came over with a ring on her left hand.  I knew something was different but couldn’t figure it out.  Humans, who knows what they’re up to?

Everything changed in October of ’41.  I heard the kid and the farmer argue in the barn one evening.  The farmer kept saying, “You don’t have to go.”  He said, “You’re a farmer; farmers should stay home and farm so the army has food.  That’s a service to your country.”  The kid kept saying, “I’ve been drafted and have to go.”  I listened and thought, go away?  Go where?  How long?  Why?  Anyhow, he left two days later.  His mother cried in the kitchen, and his father was always mad.

For the first time, the kid wasn’t around.

As best I could tell, he went off for training and then was shipped to England (where’s that?). 

These two men came to the door In June of ’44, when we should have been doing the fourth mowing in the orchard, and the cut grass would smell like spring, and the damn dog would run next to us, and she would sit on my fender and read poems.  They drove a black Ford and wore fancy clothes with ribbons on their chests and gold ropes stuck to their shoulders.  They held their hats under their left arms when they knocked. After they left, everyone cried everywhere. 

He wasn’t coming back.  I missed the damn dog, and I missed her, but I missed him most of all.  I would have cried if I could.

I am a tractor, but I’ve seen things.