Lot Forty
I drove up to buy a stock tank.
That is all I went for. A three-hundred-gallon Rubbermaid stock tank for the heifer lot, because the old galvanized one had rusted through on the bottom, and Earl had been saying since August that he’d get to it.
He wasn’t going to get to it now. So I put on my church shoes, because they were the only clean ones by the back door, and I drove forty minutes north to the Hanson Brothers fall consignment sale outside Cannon Falls.
I figured I’d be in and out in an hour. Find the tank. Bid on it. Load it in the pickup. Drive back to the hospital before dark.
Then I saw the wheels.
The Hanson sale is the biggest one in our part of southern Minnesota. Twice a year, spring and fall, farmers from four counties bring everything they want to get rid of. Tractors, combines, hay rakes, grain wagons, gates, fence posts, anvils, rusty milk cans. It all gets lined up in long rows across a forty-acre hayfield, with a lot number wired to every item.
I was walking down the third row, looking for the stock tanks, when I saw a red tractor at the end of the line.
An old one. A Farmall. You can tell a Farmall from a quarter mile away. Tall and narrow, with the big rear wheels and the little front ones set close together, so it looks like it’s standing on tiptoe.
There are thousands of old Farmalls in Minnesota. I didn’t think anything of it at first.
Then I got closer. And I saw the wheels.
Earl ground those lug weights himself.
The big cast-iron weights bolted to the inside of the rear wheels. Every old tractor has them. But the right-hand one on Earl’s tractor had a crack in the casting, and the winter he restored it, he’d ground the crack smooth with an angle grinder so it wouldn’t spread.
When he painted the wheel afterward, the grinder had left a little smooth spot that the paint wouldn’t stick to right. About the size of a thumb. A silver thumbprint in the red paint.
Nineteen years I knew that mark.
Nineteen years I watched Earl wipe it with a rag every Labor Day morning before the parade. “That’s my signature,” he’d say. “Leonardo da Vinci didn’t sign his best one either.”
I don’t think that’s true about da Vinci. But Earl always said it.
There was a lot tag wired to the wheel. A square of white cardboard with a black number on it.
It was wired on with a twist of baling wire. Rusty and bright at the same time, the way baling wire gets after a couple of years in a barn.
Our baling wire. From the spool hanging on the nail inside our barn door. I know that because Earl buys it from the co-op in Zumbrota, and it’s a heavier gauge than the stuff they sell in town. I’d wound enough of it around enough gates to know the feel of it under my fingers.
I reached out and touched it. My hand was shaking.
I stood there in my church shoes in that hayfield and shook.
People were walking past me. Men in feed caps and Carhartt coats, holding Styrofoam cups of coffee from the church ladies’ food stand. Kids running between the tractors. Somebody’s dog.
A boy walked by. Maybe sixteen. Skinny, in a camouflage hoodie, with a bidder’s card stuck in his back pocket. He stopped beside me and looked at the tractor.
“Nice old M,” he said. “You bidding?”
I didn’t look at him. I looked at the silver thumbprint.
“She is not for sale,” I said.
He gave me a look. The look teenage boys give old women who say strange things. Then he kept going.
Chapter Two: Doyle
The sale office was in a white trailer at the edge of the field, up on cinder blocks, with an extension cord running to it from a generator.
There was a girl behind the counter. Maybe twenty. Blonde ponytail, a Hanson Brothers Auction sweatshirt, a stack of bidder cards in front of her.
“I need to know who brought lot forty,” I said. “The Farmall M. Third row.”
She looked at me. Then at her computer.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “We can’t give out consignor information. It’s company policy.”
“It’s my husband’s tractor.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was taken without his permission.”
She looked uncomfortable. She glanced at the door behind her.
“You’d have to talk to Doyle,” she said. “He’s the yard man. He handles the lots.”
Doyle Pettersen was out by the loading chute, directing a man backing a flatbed trailer.
I’d known Doyle for twenty-five years. Not well. He came to our place once, years ago, to haul off an old chisel plow Earl sold. He’d stood in our yard and drunk two cups of my coffee and told Earl a long story about a goat.
He was in his sixties now. Heavy, slow-moving, with a gray mustache and a John Deere cap so old the green had faded nearly white.
When he saw me, his face changed.
“Darlene,” he said. “I heard about Earl. I’m real sorry. How’s he doing?”
“Not good, Doyle,” I said.
I told him about the tractor.
He listened without saying anything. When I was done, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. A long list. Every lot in the sale, with the consignor’s name next to it.
He ran his finger down the list. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
He stopped.
His mouth went flat. Like somebody had pulled a string at both corners.
“Consigned by Kevin,” he said quietly. “Kevin Lindgren. Thursday.”
Thursday.
Two days after they wheeled his father in.
I stood there by the loading chute with the wind blowing chaff across the field, and I did the arithmetic in my head because I couldn’t stop myself.
Earl had his stroke on Tuesday morning. In the machine shed, around seven-thirty. He’d gone out to grease the baler. I found him on the floor by the workbench when he didn’t come in for breakfast. He was trying to talk and only half his mouth was moving.
The ambulance from Kenyon took him to the hospital in Rochester. Sixty miles south. On the way there, his heart quit on top of it. The paramedics brought him back in the back of the ambulance on Highway 52.
By Tuesday night he was in the ICU on a ventilator. Tubes in his arms. A machine breathing for him.
Kevin came. He sat in that waiting room on Tuesday night and cried. Big, ugly crying, with his face in his hands. I sat next to him and rubbed his back. The first time in nineteen years I’d ever touched my stepson like that.
Then on Wednesday he drove home.
And on Thursday he loaded the tractor.
He had a key to the shed. Of course he did. Because he is family.
Earl gave it to him the day Kevin moved back to the area eight years ago. “Anytime you need anything,” Earl told him. “Tools, equipment, anything. What’s mine is yours.”
“Doyle,” I said. “I need you to pull it. Take it out of the sale.”
He looked at me with real sorrow.
“I can’t, Darlene.”
“It’s not his. It’s Earl’s.”
“I know it.” He rubbed his mustache. “But there’s no title on a tractor that old. A 1948 M? There’s never been a title. Whoever brings it in with a key and signs the consignment form, that’s the owner far as we know. Unless somebody shows us otherwise.”
“Then I’m showing you otherwise.”
“With what?” 