Under the rag was a Prince Albert tobacco tin, the same red I remembered from his shirt pocket my whole boyhood, rusted at the seams but shut tight. I went still because I could smell it before I even opened it, that ghost of diesel and tobacco that was the exact smell of the man.
Inside was a photograph and a folded square of paper.
The photograph was old, the colors gone soft. It showed my grandpa young, maybe forty, up on this same tractor in a field of tall corn, and on his knee, both fists on the wheel, grinning like a fool, was a boy of about four. Me. I had no memory of the picture being taken. But I knew that grin, and I knew those hands of his around my middle, holding me steady so I could pretend to steer the whole world.
The paper was a note, in his blunt pencil, the letters pressed hard the way he wrote.
Iron is honest and it lasts. So does this. If you are reading it, you came back for the tractor, which means I raised you right after all.
He had put it in the toolbox years ago. He could not have known when I would find it, or if I ever would. He only knew that the tractor was mine, left separate and on purpose, and that a day might come when I hauled it home and started taking it apart, and that when I got down to the toolbox I would need to hear from him one more time.
I am no farmer. I live in town and I push papers for a living, and my grandpa knew all of that and left me the Deere anyway, over the working farm, over everything. I used to wonder why. Sitting up on that cracked seat with his tin in my hands, I finally understood. He did not leave me the tractor because he thought I would plow with it. He left it because it was the one thing on that farm that still had him inside it, and he wanted his town boy to have somewhere to go and find his grandpa waiting.
I got that old Deere running about a month later. It does not have a field to work, so on Sunday evenings I just drive it slow up and down the lane behind my house, the engine knocking, the smell of diesel coming up warm, my grandpa riding right there beside me the way he swears in that note he always will. I keep the tin in my shirt pocket now. Red, rusted, shut tight. Right where his was.