When Jo got home from Laureltown, Henry was back from the farmers market in Monticello and was working on the Ford tractor in the machine shed. She changed her clothes and walked down to see if she could help. She found him standing at the rear of the building, staring at the shelves above his head. He wore coveralls and rubber boots and his battered straw cowboy hat.
“What are you looking for?”
Without turning he held up the thing in his hand. “Fuel pump.”
“You have a spare?”
“Someplace.”
“Imagine my surprise.”
Jo went over to look at the same shelves. Henry was seventy-one years old and had never—to Jo’s knowledge—thrown away a single thing over the course of those seven decades. That meant that he in all likelihood had a spare fuel pump for a 1952 Ford tractor. It also meant that the fuel pump might be hard to locate, tucked away as it undoubtedly was among the cluttered collection of carburetors, pumps, electric motors, pulleys, belts, chain saws, jacks, vises, hammers, axes and hundreds of other items crammed onto the shelves.
“How was the birthday party?” Henry asked, his eyes fixed narrowly on the shelves. Like Ahab, scanning the horizon for the great whale.
“The party was good.”
“She like the book?”
“She loved the book. She said to tell you hello.”
Henry nodded, handing Jo the fuel pump he’d been carrying before moving across the floor to a wooden stepladder, which he propped against one of the posts that held the shelving in place. He climbed up and pulled forward a wooden Pepsi crate, had a look inside and put it back. He pulled down another, this one Orange Crush, and did the same. The third time was a charm; the crate he brought down had inside eight or nine fuel pumps of different sizes and designs. Two matched the one Jo was holding.
“How was Monticello?” she asked as he went to work bolting the used pump onto the tractor.
“About four hundred,” he said.
“What moved?”
“Tomatoes, potatoes,” he said. “Summer squash. Little bit of everything.”
He dropped a bolt and it rolled under the tractor. With his creaky knees, he had trouble kneeling down to look for it. The lighting in the shed was as old as Henry and that didn’t help. Jo went around to the other side of the tractor and found the bolt where it had lodged in a crack in the concrete floor.
“So what did she say?” he asked.
“Grace?”
“Yeah.”
“She showed everybody the book and explained everything in it. Buster and the goats and the chickens. Gathering the eggs. The frogs in the pond. There are a couple dozen people in Pennsylvania who have heard enough about this farm to last them a lifetime.”
“She never said nothing about me?”
“You are something else,” Jo said. “Yeah, she told them about the old guy with the beard who makes his own wine and beer. She didn’t mention you growing ganja back by the bush because she doesn’t know you do that.”
“I’ll show her when she’s old enough.”
“You will not.”
The pump was in place. Henry threaded in the two fuel lines and tightened them with a wrench. “Did you invite them for Thanksgiving?”
“Yeah. They’re coming.”
The old man wiped his hands with a rag and then reached over and hit the starter button. After half a minute, the tractor coughed and fired. He revved it until it would idle on its own, then shut it down. He looked at Jo.
“I was thinking,” he said. “We should head over to the livestock auction in Britnell and buy a pony. We could hitch it to a cart and haul root vegetables from that back field.”
Jo nodded. “We’ve got a tractor to haul root vegetables from that back field. You want to buy a pony for Grace.”
“Maybe I do.”
“That’s a good idea, Henry.”