Kept proving that everything I’d done was right.
At the far end of the field, I needed to turn around.
Wide arc.
Plenty of room.
Nothing complicated.
I’d made this turn a hundred times on smaller equipment.
But I forgot something crucial.
This wasn’t the old tractor anymore.
It was stronger, faster, more responsive than what my muscle memory expected.
I gave it too much throttle coming out of the turn.
The rear wheels, already stressed from pulling the heavy plow through resistant soil, lost traction.
The whole machine lurched sideways.
I yanked the steering wheel, trying to correct, but momentum had other ideas.
The tractor slewed toward the irrigation ditch, picking up speed.
I hit the brakes.
Too late.
We went over the edge.
Not a flip, thank God.
Just a hard slide down the embankment.
The tractor tilted at forty-five degrees, threatening to roll but somehow staying upright.
Metal screamed.
Something underneath crashed against rocks.
Then we stopped, wedged in the ditch at an angle that made my stomach hurt just looking at it.
I killed the engine with shaking hands and climbed out carefully, trying not to shift the weight distribution.
My legs barely held me when I hit solid ground.
Iris was running across the field.
Mrs. Finch right behind her.
I heard Iris screaming my name, her voice cracking with panic.
She reached me, grabbed my shoulders, and checked me for injuries with practiced nurse efficiency.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Goldie, are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You almost died.”
“I didn’t.”
“The tractor’s stable.”
But it wasn’t stable.
And it wasn’t fine either.
The exhaust pipe I’d so carefully welded had caught a boulder on the way down and cracked clean through.
Oil dripped from somewhere underneath, forming a dark puddle that spread across the ditch bottom.
Long scrapes gouged the tractor’s side where it had scraped against dirt and rock.
Mrs. Finch slid down into the ditch, assessing the damage with the cold eye of someone who’d seen plenty of mechanical disasters.
“Exhaust is broken. You’ve got a loose oil line, maybe worse. And we’re going to need a winch to get this thing out.”
She looked up at Iris.
“When’s your grandma due back?”
Iris checked her watch.
“Three hours. Maybe less.”
Mrs. Finch looked at me.
“Well, we’d better work fast.”
She hiked back up the embankment, drove her truck across the field, and positioned it at the top of the ditch.
Her son Everett showed up thirty minutes later with a commercial-grade winch and chain that could probably pull a house off its foundation.
Everett was twenty-eight, built like his father had been, quiet like his mother.