The sight of Joe, my youngest brother, standing by the shed stunned me. “You can’t be here. You’re in the field on old John, raking.”
He just sort of looked at me. He’s long used to my ways. Joe lives in a world bounded by a physical reality I don’t trust so much. My best sophisms will fail to convince him he does not stand where he stands.
Within seconds, it hits him. “You must have seen Bobby.”
That was it. My image of Joe did not accept the man in his fifties. He would always be the skinny blond kid with the bangs who I had just passed raking hay in the big field on our grandfather’s 1947 John Deere A. Bobby looked exactly like his father at that age. The shock explained, I went on with preparing to bale hay. Most days, the harsh sunlight of haymaking weather helps, and I see with more clarity, not today.
What was is gone. Our grandfather is long dead. Me and Joe are old men.
That old John Deere A will always be the embodiment of our grandfather. Our sister named him Poppa for the distinctive popping sound of its gas-powered engine. If my grandfather wasn’t on the tractor, he was in the farm shop with the sickle bar mower locked in a pair of vices working on the blades.
Images cling hard. A woman who stopped at the farm demanded, “Who are you?” Her gray hair, beat-up car, and lined face said the story of the harsh life of the hills. I won’t match the rudeness of those who have survived. When I invoked my name, she turned louder. “You are not.”
“You’re thinking of my grandfather.” Time does funny things in these hills, and maybe she’s forgotten he’s twenty years dead. “I have his name.”
My grandfather knew workhorses and hand tools. Times changed, and my father used his life on internal combustion engines. Me, I had a packed down path behind their workshop.
|
Mollified some, about why I dared to a name I didn’t measure up to, she didn’t say anything else about my grandfather, if just for a few minutes, she had that look of a person remembering things she didn’t intend to share. She kept the stories, the ones about the kindnesses he had extended in the Depression to those who had nothing. The stories could die. I had done nothing to earn hearing how he had paid for the funerals of the children of Florrie and Robie, when there was no money, children from her family.
In this country a farm and a name run together. New owners, younger members of the same family, don’t always assume right of place.
My grandfather knew workhorses and hand tools. Times changed, and my father used his life on internal combustion engines. Me, I had a packed down path behind their workshop. If I couldn’t get away from it, I worked on old engines in agony imaging just how the light at that exact moment hit a moss-covered boulder deep in woods few besides me walked. Neither my father nor grandfather accepted they couldn’t pass on what they were to me.
They’d be surprised to learn some of it did pass down. Joe and I don’t talk about some things. We’re children. Only Joe and I are at home. The New River has risen in sudden flood. The John Deere A shouldn’t be near the river. Joe, maybe ten, is trying to start the tractor in the rain. The old wiring catches fire. Rain has no effect on an electrical fire. From my distance, where I check for cattle caught on the high ground near the river, I see the tractor seconds away from blowing. Joe is out there on the hood with a rag blotting out the fire. I expect to see Joe die for something unworth his life. Instead he blots out the last of the fire, risks cranking the engine, it catches this time, and he moves the tractor to higher ground.
Joe has completely restored the faded John Deere, rebuilding the engine, painting the frame, and exactly matching the original detailing, even down to the red gas cap that model sported. We never knew the old John Deere A was supposed to have a red gas cap. Years ago our grandfather painted it green with paint from a can and a brush.