What Is, or
Back on the Tractor

And there is little left to tell, although of course there was much that later happened. Much of what had occupied my mind waking and sleeping proved to be so much smoke when I at last woke up and began to see the world more clearly. Phillip did not show up for our exhibition against my varsity team the day after the dance, but we did go ahead and play, after a fashion, with the help of our second-stringers. My varsity beat us handily, as they should have, although we old men did not disgrace ourselves, and I actually played fairly well until the second half, when I benched myself. I told the guys that my ankle was hurting, which, indeed, it was, if only a little. What perhaps was most important, though, was that we made enough money off gate fees and donations that the Watonga basketball program will be able to go a long time—certainly the rest of my coaching career—before having to beg Bill Cobb for anything else.

Although we continued to play unevenly for the rest of the season, my Watonga High team actually finished with a winning record and, by virtue of a huge last-second win over the Okeene Whippets, we went to the district playoffs, where Seiling beat us handily, as they should have. B. W. was recruited by a dozen colleges, but he has stuck to his resolution of going to forestry school in Montana, and Michelle is determined that we will go up this spring break—all of us—to find a place for him to live next fall. For the drive up, she has made reservations for us at a condominium in Winter Park, Colorado, where the youth of our church have gone on ski trips during past spring breaks. B. W. has told me about his first time skiing and gleefully shown me a map of the slopes at Winter Park, of ski runs called Runaway and Feebleminded. When I ask if there’s a slope called Fall Down and Break Your Fool Neck, he and Lauren laugh and laugh and just say they can’t wait to watch the old man eat snow.

Michelle and I have talked at length about our next twenty years of life, and the upshot is that, this fall, I’m going to start attending classes at Southwestern State University in nearby Weatherford. Mrs. Edmondson, Watonga’s eleventh-grade English teacher, is getting along in years and will step down in the not-too-distant future, and it is my thinking that Watonga juniors deserve a good English teacher at least as much as the seniors do. Michelle says she could not be more proud of me, and although money will be tight, I look forward to our future together with the joy I might have been feeling all along.

Still, as I have said before but never understood so well as now: better late than never.

There is one thing more, a sad thing, I must tell. One February morning, some few short weeks ago, Michelle’s mother called. Lauren answered the phone and then turned to us and said, “Grandma’s crying.”

Michelle took the phone from her, said “Mom,” listened intently for a moment, and then her face crumpled and tears welled up in her eyes and she lowered the phone and slid to the floor, and I ran across the room and gathered her into my arms.

“It’s the baby,” Michelle sobbed into my shirtfront. “They lost the baby. Michael and Gloria. She had a miscarriage.” She looked up into my eyes. “Gloria will be okay. But they lost the baby.”

I held her tight and felt my own eyes fill. “It’s okay,” I said. I looked up at Lauren, who was biting her lower lip, and held a hand out to her. “Everything will be okay.”

Lauren hung up the phone and then we sat on the floor, the three of us, holding each other. Michelle looked up at me finally and said fiercely, “Don’t tell me it’s for the best. Don’t you dare tell me this is going to be better for them than having that baby.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said. “I don’t even think that. Not anymore.”

She sank her face into my shoulder, and her muffled voice was soft in my ear. “I know they can have another. But I was so ready to be a grandma. Is that selfish?”

“You wanted them to be happy,” I corrected. “The grandma stuff was just a happy by-product.”

It took awhile, but at last Michelle stopped crying, although she was still shaking her head. “Why does something like this happen?” she asked. “Why couldn’t things just go smoothly for a little longer?”

“There’s a reason for everything that happens,” I said. “There’s gotta be.”

She looked up at me. “Do you believe that, J. J.? Really truly believe that?”

“Yes,” I said, and despite the somberness of the moment, I felt suddenly at peace. “Yes, I do.”

My crisis of faith—if that was what it had been—was finally over.

That afternoon an old Chevy pickup topped the rise and headed down the driveway toward the house, and Frank, who for once was standing guard duty instead of his usual practice of wandering the pastures looking for rabbits, let out a low baying noise—ah roo roo.

When the truck pulled up in front, I stepped out onto the porch to say howdy.

Phillip One Horse emerged from the vehicle, which on closer inspection proved to be the selfsame Chevy truck he and I had worked on those cold winter afternoons back when he was helping me out around the place.

We stood there for a moment, him in the open door of his truck, me on the top step of my porch. “I didn’t think that thing would ever run again,” is what I finally said.

“Well,” he said, “it didn’t run without some help. You were right, you know.”

“Right?”

“It was the head gasket. Simple enough to fix once I finally knew what needed to be done. Hop in.” And he motioned to the passenger side with his head.

I smiled sadly. “I’m happy to see you, Phillip. Really. Happier than I can say. But we’ve had some really hard news today. Can I take a rain check?”

“I know your news,” he said, and he motioned with his head again. “My grandmother sent me. She told me I ought to take you to your son.”

I shook my head. There was the tragedy of it all. “I think your grandmother must have her wires crossed. Michael won’t see me. And even if he would, I wouldn’t know what to say. There’s too much distance between us.”

Phillip stepped closer to me, and his voice was low but full of feeling. “Words are not the most important things we offer those in pain. It’s standing behind those words, John. Being there. Not giving up. You should know that. You should know that better than anyone.”

“But he won’t see me,” I repeated. “I’ve—” I stepped down, took him by the shoulder. “Listen, Phillip, you go. Tell him how sorry we are—”

“I will not tell him,” he said, and he took a step backward. “If you have a message to give your son, then come with me.”

“But I don’t,” I said. “I can’t think of—”

“It’s okay, John,” he said. “I know the words of your heart.” I felt his strong hand take my arm, and he would not let me go. He tugged me to the truck and up into it and closed the door behind me.

There was much I wanted to know, much I wanted to tell him, but when I asked how he had been, he simply said, “We can talk later. Now is a good time for silence. A good time to pray, if you believe in it.”

And I did pray, as hard as I’ve ever prayed in my life. I thought that I’d even uncovered some strength, but when we pulled up in front of the little frame house where Michael and Gloria lived, my courage fled like air escaping a balloon.

I had the image of myself standing at that door, knocking, knocking, and nobody answering. “He won’t talk to me,” I said, a third time.

“Have faith,” Phillip said, and he came around and pulled me from the truck. We went to the door. Phillip knocked, and we waited for what seemed years before Michael opened the door and looked out at us through the tattered screen. He had lost weight, and his eyes had shadows beneath them, but even with the evidence of life’s hard use, I thought he had never looked so handsome, so grown up.

Whatever he had been when he left us, he was a man now.

Michael did not turn on his heel and shut the door in our faces, but neither did he open the screen to us.

He stood there; he did not look at me, and he did not speak.

“Michael,” Phillip said, “we know there is nothing we can say at a time like this. We have just come to weep with you.”

Michael raised his eyes to mine. He searched my face for something that would tell him what to do, what to think. I don’t know what he found there. All I know is that, at last, he opened the screen door and ushered us inside.

I will not say that all our problems are behind us, or that we have made up in weeks for years where we did not listen to each other and did not understand each other. But I can say that last Sunday we met Michael and Gloria for dinner at the Hooks’ home after church, that Michael shook my hand, and that both of them were noted on occasion to smile, despite our presence.

And now I sit inside the sun-warmed tractor cab on a chilly March afternoon. I have no reason to be here. I was walking past, I saw the tractor, I climbed up. Maybe I wanted a temporary refuge from the howling north wind; maybe I was seized by a perverse impulse to once again look out at my farm through these dirt-streaked windows.

At first glance, this does not look like an appealing world. Rodents have made their home somewhere in here over the winter, for there are rat droppings at my feet; every surface is covered with red field dust; a discolored plastic spit cup from the long-ago days when I used to chew Red Man is wedged down between the instrument panel and my chair. Then, from underneath the seat, a fly buzzes, as if newly born into existence, and I watch with some interest as he stirs into flight, bounces off some windows, settles on the steering wheel in front of me after his adventures to rest in the sunlight and get his bearings.

Maybe he can see that there is a larger world outside, a world where he could fly endlessly. Maybe he even knows that there is a way to reach that world if he is only willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

But it is also a cold world out there, and the winds howl like wolves, and he could easily be carried off, never to be seen again.

Here there is warmth, there is light, and, within certain definable boundaries, there is freedom.

“Stay put,” I advise him, a message from God. Then I zip up my coat, pull on my gloves, and prepare to step briefly back into the cold before going back into my warm kitchen to kiss my wife, to hug my children, to take up again my wondrous life.