On summer mornings the old man and I would go to our tractors after breakfast. We would fuel them by gravity from an overhead tank. Then we would grease the tractors and plow wheels in silence. The greasing of tractors and plows was followed by silent greasing of boots. There was always a little gob of grease left on the business end of the gun. The old man would daub it on his boots. We never discussed our silence while greasing, but I have always believed the greasing was a silent religious ritual like lighting candles at an altar. The ritual was performed to care for the big iron beasts that faithfully worked all day, the iron beasts that plowed the fields, planted the seed, harvested the crops.
Next came the preparation of the stone jug. The old man would start the water pump, and I would pull the water pipe away from the mouth of the old pump jack, he would bend down and fill the stone jug with cold water. Then he would soak the burlap sack he had tied around the stone jug until it was dripping. He plugged the jug with a tapered stick, carved from the box elder tree growing there at the pump jack, and he slid his wrist through the black leather strap and carried it over to his tractor. He was in charge of the water. He hung the strap over the shift for the power takeoff.
That done, we would start the tractors one at a time. In the early days I would go to the gearbox area and operate the choke while the old man cranked. But as I got bigger and he began to fail, he would operate the choke and I cranked.
"Never put your thumb around the crank handle opposite your fingers," he would tell me. "If it kicks, it will catch on your thumb and break your arm. If your thumb is wrapped around the handle in the same direction as your fingers, it will just kick out of your hand."
Two or three cranks is what it took to start a tractor, usually with a choke on the first two. As soon as the engine roared to life, the choke man pushed back on the choke. The first tractor would run while we started the second tractor in the same manner.
There was always one more thing to say after the tractors were started. He would shout that we would take our lunch break at 11:45. But we didn't have watches. He would watch the sun. The old man was good at telling time by the sun.
Leaving for the field was exhilarating to me. The tractors were roaring, we would wheel them in circles and put them in road gear and bounce along to the field. About the time we got to the field he would motion to me to remember to switch the fuel over from gas to tractor fuel which was hotter than gas, but didn't work well when the tractors were cold.
I would start to plow right away, but he always stopped at the corn field and placed the stone jug with the water in the shade of a corn row. Because of his stop, he would follow me for the two or three hours until our water break.
My tractor was orange, where it still had paint. It had no soul. It was bought only a few years earlier and it did not come with a soul. It was only a machine. In fact, it was a 1937 CC Case tractor. The old man's tractor was just rust colored now. It was a 1936 CC Case. I was surprised to hear a cousin refer to it once as the blue tractor. Apparently it was blue at one time, but in my lifetime I had never seen even a speck of blue on it. The blue tractor had a soul. The old man had driven it nearly every day for 25 years, and ever since I could remember it had a soul.
As the sun moved across the sky there would be times when we were passing each other going opposite directions. I would wave when we passed. He thought the waving was funny. He would wave and grin a self-conscious kind of laugh.
There were times when my tractor followed the old man's tractor back and forth across the field. I watched him when I was behind. He dressed in blue jeans and a thin, long-sleeved, blue work shirt. He rolled his sleeves up two hitches and his hands and wrists were tanned as dark as old leather. His broken fingers wrapped the steering wheel oddly. I could see the bloodstained age blotches on the backs of his hands. When we passed each other, I could see the cigarette ash burns on the front of his shirt and arms. It must have been difficult to roll those smokes while plowing. And the wind had obviously blown the embers off the end of his hand-rolled cigarette more than once. I watched his tractor as he plowed through the clay patch at one end of the field. I would see the smoke from the chimney change from nearly clear to a thin blue-black cloud as the tractor struggled to plow the clay. I never heard him use the term clay. He always referred to it with the less scientific term "tiger shit."
I admired his ease of sitting on the tractor and his economy of motion as he came to the end of the field and wheeled his tractor and plow. He must have come to his straight-backed posture from many years of riding until he had found the single position that left him most rested at the end of the day. On the other hand I was only a boy, and I did much squirming and sat in many positions on the tractor. His fluid motions in turning had come from repeating the same motions a thousand times. I was still a little jerky in maneuvering and I lacked confidence. Sometimes I had to stop the tractor and adjust my turn or wheel around in a second loop to get the tractor to line up with the furrow I would follow.
Somehow his posture and movements led me to believe he was happy to be alive that day, happy to be working in the field with his grandson, happy in spite of the heat, and the dust and the noise. When we stopped for water and a minute of conversation while our tractors idled he always had a joke or something happy to say. He was thankful for the water, already lukewarm in the heat of the day.
We sat on gunny sacks wired to the iron seats. They offered a little padding and abated the sweat- soaked butts we would get without them.
At the end of the day we would pull our plows up from the earth, put our tractors in road gear, and drive back to the barnyard. I was dead tired by this time. We would park our tractors, each in its own place, and shut of the gas valves. The tractors would run another 20 or 30 seconds until the remaining fuel in the lines was consumed, and they would stop and then start once again for a few more seconds as air bubbles came through the fuel line. It always seemed to me that the tractors wanted to continue to work and that they died a slow death of strangulation each evening. The silence without the noise of the engines was unnerving after a day on the tractor.
These days repeated through the summer, and the next summer and the next. Finally the old man became too weak to continue and he scheduled a farm sale for the early fall.
My dad and I came to the farm sale. The old man hung back at the edge of the crowd of men, and as the day wore on he grew too tired to stand and had to sit in the car with the window down.
The farm equipment was lined up in rows and the auctioneer moved from item to item as the sale progressed. It was all very sad for me and I concentrated on my relatives, not the sale, as the day went on. I did notice however, that most of the equipment was being sold to strangers. This made me sad. Finally, after a long day. they got to the old man's blue Case tractor. The auctioneer opened the bidding at $100 and nobody bid. There was just silence. My heart sank. Could these men not see that the tractor had its own soul? Could they not see how hard it died when it had its fuel shut off? Could they not tell much it wanted to work? Could they not know that the tractor did nearly all the work on my grandfather's farm for 25 years? The auctioneer chided the men, saying it was old, but still a good tractor and deserved worthy bids. I felt embarrassed for the faithful tractor. I wanted to hide with it. The auctioneer had the men start the tractor so we could all hear it run. Somebody started it, and it ran strong and proud, if a little too loud. Then they shut it off and he asked for a bid. Somebody finally bid $50, then the price was gradually bid back up to $100, at which point the auctioneer sold it. It went to a stranger. I couldn't look.
This was one of the last days of my childhood. I never again was able to see the soul in a machine.