Tractor

Jacoba Mendelkow

I am twenty-three. I leave the cool darkness of the house and step into the heavy sunshine. The light stings my eyes, and I shade them. I walk across the over-watered grass. I cross a patch of heavy clay dust, toward my grandfather’s tractor. The domed robin’s-egg-blue shed layers shade across the yard. Surrounding me are pieces of machinery, long since broken, littering the space just beyond the grass and the driveway. The combine my father was nearly killed in is hunched in the corner, ancient and broken. Old trucks, parts of tractors, pieces of sheds, and piles of trash litter my grandmother’s Nebraska farmyard. The old tractor stands alone. Rusted in places, it is majestic.

“Tractor” comes from the Latin, tractus, “to draw”. The word tractor is a simple extension of this idea. All of my life I have been drawn to the tractor and the world it represents. I don’t want to live on a farm or marry a farmer, but I know that there is a part of me that is so deeply ingrained that I can never really escape it. Somehow I am attached to it. I honestly don’t know why. I don’t know how hydraulics work or how much horsepower it takes to do a task. I don’t know what makes one person’s hay better than another when they look the same. I know nothing about the different brands of tractors, and I don’t understand the difference between a combine or a swather. I do know that where there are tractors and men who know how to run them, this is where I belong. And even though I am lost as to the reasons why, this is my home.

I am three years old. We have left the farm, moved to Utah, and returned to the farm to visit. Grandma takes my picture. My brother is with me, along with one cousin. We climb the metal tires of the tractor, and we fight over the seat. Grandma threatens us and we all smile our genuine smiles for the camera.

I am six years old. We are home because Grandpa is dead. We wipe the tears from our faces and Grandma follows us out into the yard. We pass our dust hills where we play matchbox cars and look down as we walk so as not to step on one of Grandma’s beloved toads; Grandma loves her toads; she says that they keep the bugs down and keep her flowers “purty.” We cross the driveway, pass the shed, and soberly climb onto Grandpa’s tractor. There are more than three of us now. There are seven. Our parents sit in the darkness of the house, talking about how to divide Grandpa’s things. Daddy will take his gun, the muzzle loader. His brother will take a shotgun. We children each get a keychain: “Mack R. Nutt, McCurdy Seed.” Farming is a risky career choice. A farmer must rely completely on the weather during the entire year. A beautiful thunderstorm with lightning and hail can devastate a farmer, completely wiping out months of effort and draining bank accounts. A winter with too little snow will cause irrigation problems the next summer. The National Safety Council’s 1999 “Injury Facts” reports that agriculture is the second most dangerous industry in the nation. Deaths on farms are more than 22 per 100,000. Tractors are involved in 19% of the deaths that occur on farms each year, and seven percent of injuries require time in the hospital.

My step-uncle was killed by his three-year-old daughter over twenty years ago. The swather was broken, and he was fixing it. While under the blades, his brown-eyed daughter kicked a lever. The blades fell, and he was crushed. His eight-year-old son found him; his daughter was crying alone in the cab.

I am twelve and my father has moved out. He had found a new woman to love, a woman with a new family, an infant daughter who looks so much like me. My parents fight, screaming at each other on the phone, name calling and swearing.

My mother calls me at the neighbors, she tells me to pack myself a bag because we are going home. We drive through the night and my mother takes caffeine pills to stay awake. The home we find in the early morning hours, twelve blurry hours later, is my father’s childhood home. My grandma embraces each of us, and my mother still calls her Mom. We all cry like there has been a death, and for us there has been. My mother and father exist no more as they had for thirteen years. But we are comforted by the things that we remember: the flowers and the toads and the mounds of oat-colored clay; the kittens and the fields and dinners of Swiss steak and mashed potatoes. The blue shed has faded but the turquoise steel still stands. The house is sticky and the crickets sing at night. My mother cries in her former mother-in-law’s arms. We children play with newborn kittens wrapped in dishtowels. My grandfather’s grave is gaudy with silk flowers: blues and pinks and yellows. His headstone has a tractor engraved next to his name while Grandma’s name is alone except for her birthday. We stay only a few days but as children we know why we have come home. This is the place my mother remembers as her home. She needs to see the cornfields and breathe the moist air. She needs to be reminded. It reminds me of my father.

Before we leave we climb onto the tractor. I stand in front surrounded by my four brothers. The sky is gray with rain clouds that are threatening to cry, heavy rain clouds threatening to release their weight, baptizing us with their cleansing and violent bursts. Grandma asks us to smile and we do, but our eyes are glistening because we are sad. Our smiles are no longer genuine but pained. We are missing something. Someone.

I am sixteen. My mother has found out that a neighbor’s wife has left him. He is handsome and vulnerable. He is also a farmer and farms the patch of property west of our house in northern Utah. My backyard is large—weedy grass and few trees. The trampoline sits on the only level piece of the property. My mother wears a red bathing suit; she lies on the trampoline, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man in his tractor as he cuts the alfalfa. She hopes that he sees her—as near to naked as her strict morals will allow. She wants him to move first. I am forced to watch my mother want this man. I am subjected to her foolishness; I watch her, I call my friends and we laugh at my crazy, desperate mother.

The man enters the piece of land next to our home. His tractor is red. The tractor ambles slowly into the waist high alfalfa, and he begins to cut it. The grass falls in rows to dry; the sweet summer vapor fills the air.

My mother has had enough waiting. She climbs off the trampoline and enters the house. Minutes pass and she is walking toward the shed to saddle her horse. She climbs on and rides into the field, her chestnut hair bounces with each step the mare takes. Woman and horse trot up the hill, and the man in the red tractor follows.

A country singer named Kenny Chesney recorded a song when I was a teenager, which was released in March 1999 on the Everywhere We Go album. The song is called “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” The chorus of the song repeats:

She thinks my tractor’s sexy

It really turns her on

She’s always staring at me

While I’m chuggin’ along

She likes the way it’s pullin’

while we’re tillin’ up the land

She’s even kind of crazy

‘bout my farmer’s tan

She’s the only one

who really understands what gets me

She thinks my tractor’s sexy

“She thinks my tractor’s sexy” is repeated eight times in the song. The woman in the song brings the singer “a basket full of chicken and a big cold jug of sweet tea.” She is later mentioned as having a “dream” and we find out that her dream consists of “a small farm and a yard full of kids.” I am not drawn to the dream of a farmer’s wife. I don’t want these things, yet I feel as though I am bound. I lived by the ocean for three years. I miss the smells of salt and fish and rotting seaweed. I miss smog and unsmiling, unfamiliar faces. And yet I came home; I came back to dirt and wheat and open acres of wild land. I cannot escape this.

I am a child at seventeen. My boyfriend drives a tractor. His tractor is new and is the color of over-watered grass. He farms for his aunt, who allows him to live there as long as he stays out of trouble. No more beer parties, no more cigarettes and chewing tobacco. No more pot. He drives straight rows through the fields, cutting and chopping, slicing the sweet grass down like wounded soldiers. He drives the tractor and listens to music. He sits in an air-conditioned, green tractor and listens to the stereo play a Metallica CD. I see him at night and I smell his sweat and his hands. I search for the smell of the summer—the smell of cut alfalfa.

I call him one day when he does not come to see me. I call to make sure that I am not forgotten. After all, I am in love. I call him again, again. My messages become angrier, each one shorter with more bite in my voice. He does not call back.

My car drives fast ¾75 miles an hour ¾85 miles an hour. I am viciously angry, and I hate him because I know he is cheating. I can feel the knot in my stomach grow, and soon I am at his farm. I see his truck parked in the driveway, but this does not stop me. I want him to know how angry I am. I drive around the back of the house, past the feedlot of black and white cows. I spot his green tractor, dancing in the large alfalfa grass field with no trees. My stomach unknots. I turn the car around and go home. I wish that I could erase the messages I had left on his phone; I want the messages to disappear like the feelings of biting anger I felt only minutes before. I drive home slowly; my mind is somewhere else. I am thinking about my mother on her chestnut mare. I hate that I am her. I hate her motivation and her love of farmers. I hate her temper and persistence. I dread the phone call where I will be answering my lunacy—what will I say?

My grandfather’s tractor allowed him to breathe the air he was affecting with the vapors of his tractor. I imagine such a straw-hatted farmer wearing overalls as he leaves his home and climbs onto his tractor. I imagine him floating over Nebraska farmland with wheat straw hanging from his lips. I see the seas of greens and golds, and I smell the air he breathes. His nostrils and lungs expanding; his pores bleeding sweat and purity from the cleaning sweet summer air. This is not the man that farms today. Instead, young men and women drive air-conditioned, enclosed tractors. Music blasts in their ears while the science of harvesting sustenance follows behind them. Large rectangular, summery bales drop from mechanized balers—sweet, honey-green bricks of animal feed.

Wendell Barry, agrarian writer and proponent for a return to the older ways of agriculture, says: “No matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the Earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh.” He beautifully describes his feelings as well as his argument in the poem “Staying Home”:

I will wait here in the fields

to see how well the rain

brings on the grass.

In the labor of the fields

longer than a man’s life

I am at home. Don’t come with me.

You stay home too.

I am twenty-three and my daughter is five. We have gone home to see Grandma, who is aging fast. Her mind and her body are strong, but her blood is old and her eyes are tired. She is suffering from macular degeneration. She has sold her cows and her hogs; she says that it is just too much for her anymore. But she is strong. She cleans offices once a week and runs the Senior Citizen Center. She meets her sister-in-law everyday at four for a Coke at the Co-op. She watches TV from far away, never really knowing what is going on, and plays frisbee with her dog, Spook.

The house smells like dust and Lysol and Dove soap. It warms me and reminds me of Thanksgivings and matchbox cars and oatmeal mush for breakfast. The flowers bloom without care every year ¾ reds and pinks and purples and lush greens explode from the fertile soil. The toads, perhaps the children or grandchildren of my childhood toads, lay on the cool earth beneath the flowers. When it rains it is necessary to look down before each step—Grandma gets angry when you hurt a toad, especially if you step on one. My daughter dances under the same sunshine and on the same grass I knew when I was a child. She runs with the dog; she catches the wild kittens; she plays in the fine dust of the driveway. She climbs the old tractor in the yard and sits on the rusted metal seat. She always gets the seat; she is the only one left. I stand next to the tractor and look at her playing with the levers. I laugh as she tries to force the rusted steering wheel to move. She and I look up and smile at my aging, beautiful grandma without being asked. Snap. One more year together and another (perhaps the last) visit is recorded in a photo.

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