Free Renewal 7 - When the Student Is Ready by Jf Perkins Page A

of us packed under Dad’s organizational direction and stacked our collection of worldly goods on the hay wagon. Unless Eugene decided to come right back, we had plenty of time. The July sun was still well above the trees. It struck me how strange it was to watch a still-icy landscape in a long summer sunset.
    With the help of two sets of jumper cables, the station wagon, and the battery from George’s old truck, Arturo finally cranked the old diesel engine to life. He sat still as he waited for the idle to smooth out. Dad had warned him that the severe cold may have turned the engine into a fragile collection of parts. After the tractor ran smoothly for a few minutes, Arturo visibly relaxed, and stirred the gearshift lever around until he found a grinding reverse. The tractor leaped into motion. Arturo backed over to George’s fuel storage tank in a weaving pattern through the crusty snow.
    Diesel fuel stores well, but there was great concern over what the cold may have done to it. It could have separated into chemical layers, or it might be congealed into some kind of gel. In hopes of a better result, Arturo carefully ran the tractor’s hay spike through the metal loading loops on the tank, and worked the hydraulics up and down to mix whatever was in the tank. He and Dad used the hand pump to pour some out on the ground. They looked and sniffed and decided it was usable. Dad went back to the loading while Arturo filled the tractor’s tank to the brim. The engine continued to idle smoothly by fifty-year-old tractor standards, and once again, we all felt the relief.
    Without the tractor, we would have been forced to leave almost everything behind. We would be reduced to whatever we could stuff into our packs and carry on our backs. We had no doubt that anything of value would be gone by this time tomorrow.
    Every loose material went on the hay wagon, stacked flat to make a platform for the bulkier items. The stoves were wrestled onto the front edge with the idea that they would make a good heavy wall for looser supplies. We pulled all the extra stoves from the sheds, and even the charred one from the Carroll’s former home. Plastic tarps were used to contain our gear, and more tarps went on top. Dad tried pulling the outside tarps from the hay walls around the barn, but they were too brittle to survive any real motion. When he tugged, they broke into blue plastic flakes and showered to the ground.
    When everything from the barn was bundled onto the hay wagon, it looked like the Grinch’s sleigh after he raided Whoville, with one exception. There was still twelve feet of empty wagon on the back. Dad retrieved an old chain from the tack room, and lashed the fuel tank to the hay spike. Arturo put the tractor in first gear, crept across the yard, and lifted the tank high enough to place it right behind our big blue pile of stuff. We were fortunate that George hadn’t filled it right before the Breakdown. There was no way the tractor could have lifted a full tank.
    The next logical step was to use the rest of the space to carry other farm implements. You never know what comes in handy after the end of the world. The process of stacking a plow, a disc harrow, a tractor platform, a hay rake, the front end loader bucket, and some kind of seeder on the back of the wagon was slow and tedious, but seemed balanced enough to travel when they were done. The rest of us stood back and waited for whatever horrible collapse would ensue. To my simultaneous relief and disappointment, everything stayed. To take the Grinch image a little further, the last item Dad took was the ropes we had used as handrails during the endless blizzard. He and Arturo used them to tie the precarious pile of farm implements in place. Now the question was whether the tractor could pull the monstrosity we had built.
    Starting the station wagon was difficult. Unlike the diesel tractor, it ran on gasoline, and clearly that fuel was not in peak condition. It would