At dinner, she asked whether I wanted another helping of potatoes. She asked if my shoes still fit. She reminded me that school would start again in August. She did not mention the tractor, and I did not mention the fact that there were only four hundred dollars in the farm's working account after we had paid the last feed and utility bills.
I knew the number because I had been in the kitchen when she checked it. Grandma had never treated farm money as a mystery reserved for adults; she believed a person couldn't respect a thing they were never allowed to understand. But she did try to keep worry from becoming the whole atmosphere of the house. At night I sometimes heard her walking from the kitchen to the living room and back, the floorboards responding with little creaks as though someone were asking a question and getting no answer.
Our farm was not a giant operation with ten tractors and a manager to schedule them. Grandpa had planted parts of the acreage in hay, kept a smaller section in vegetables, and arranged seasonal work with neighboring farms. The income was uneven even in good years. A tractor wasn't a luxury at the Price place; it was the difference between being able to use the land and watching a growing season pass while weeds claimed what had once earned money.
That summer neighbors helped more than they had promised. Mr. Atwood, who farmed across the creek, brought his tractor over twice and refused fuel money. Mrs. Bell from the feed store let Grandma delay an invoice until September. Someone mowed the lane after a storm. Those kindnesses mattered, but I heard Grandma tell a friend on the telephone that we couldn't build another year around borrowed machines and favors nobody could afford to keep giving.
I was twelve, old enough to understand what she meant and young enough to believe understanding a problem gave me the power to fix it. For the first few weeks I tried every small thing I could think of. I sold two repaired lawn mowers, cleaned stalls for a neighbor, and helped stack hay bales when school and weather allowed. At the end of each job I put the money in a coffee tin I kept beneath my bed. I drew a crooked picture of a tractor on the lid and wrote FARM in blue marker beneath it.
By October the tin held two hundred sixty-three dollars. I knew exactly how much because I counted it every Sunday evening. Grandma once asked why I counted it so often when I had nowhere to spend it. I told her I liked knowing it was still there. She gave me a small sad smile, the kind adults give when they recognize a feeling before they recognize the words for it.