I am 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 draw bar.
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 stalls your engine. But, he figured it out and it became my pleasure to work with him.
We had a great time that first summer; we became a team. After school ended in June, he’d think of any reason to drive me; he’d take me out to get the mail from the box at the end of the driveway. It would have been faster for him to walk; I enjoyed these trips. For the rest of that year we mowed the orchard and yard, ploughed the vegetable garden, hauled trailers stacked high with apple crates, cleared snow, and had a great time. On summer weekends we pulled a wagon to the farm stand by the road 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 bad 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 for some of us.
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 kid’s clothes were homemade. The whole family scrimped, even me. The farmer started filling me up with kerosene instead of gas; did you ever try ploughing 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. On that sad day, I thanked God I wasn’t a horse. We all survived, while other farms went toes up.
In February of ‘30, the farmer showed the kid how to tune me up. He changed my plugs, oil, and filters, checked the timing, cleaned and adjusted the gap on my points. From then on, he 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 away, I’d be fine with that. Anyhow the kid loved the damn dog, so I had to deal with it; I’d always be his first love.
In the fall of ‘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 had 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 catches you looking at them, you caught them looking at you; eventually these two are going to catch each other looking at each other. I thought, here we go the whole damn 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 cars. Well, if you ask me, she was faking it, but anyhow 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. Now when he worked alone, he read a book by some guy named Hemingway about a bell and another book about a guy named Gatsby by some guy named Fitzgerald and a couple 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 bad 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 really 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 and farmers should stay home and farm, so the army has food. That’s a service to your country.” The kid kept saying he was drafted and needed to go away somewhere. 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 mad all the time.
For the first time he wasn’t around.
The best I could tell from what I heard while in the barn or ploughing the driveway or working in the garden or helping in the orchard he went off for some kind of training in California and then they shipped him to Australia (where’s that?) on a boat trip that took 40 days, he got more training, and then he went to New Guinea (who makes up these names?) to do combat with the Japanese (who are they?). I did not know what combat was, but it sounded very unpleasant.
In May of ‘44, when we should have been doing the second 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, these two men came to the door. 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.