Mitch, Neumann and Scruff
The Repair
That Tuesday was one of those brilliant and chilly Loudoun mornings in late October when light was everything.
You could watch the tree line out the window across straw and green meadows as early sun lit the treetops with scarlet, and the few leaves left were back-lighted yellow as a blaze high against the clear blue sky.
The tractor was key to the entire milling operation, and there were customer orders that went beyond rough stock stacked across the mill yard and adjoining hillside.
It was an odd sensation, the tractor rocking gently beneath him as it climbed the hillside toward the farm logging areas and untouched forest. Untouched except for some jogging trails he had spent a decade developing.
These were overgrown with red fescue, much as the forester consultant had advised fifteen years earlier, but he preferred the tidy look of the close cropped turf trails he encouraged the nearby equestrian school to use.
That early, there would be none of the nearly inaudible small talk that always announced the trail riders before the horses came into view.
There was joy in his soul to replay the events of the preceding weekend in his imagination as the tractor slowly negotiated a curve in the track and branches reached out that should have been trimmed back months earlier.
The aromas of the deserted wood spoke to him, the briny smell of tulip poplar and the tannic depth of walnut and oak. For an instant he thought he imagined these and stopped.
Ahead at a curve in the trail several large downed trees lay tangled in the bittersweet and wild grape vines where they had fallen. What, a year ago. He had removed the largest section of a black locust months earlier but its upper stories now lay recumbent across an even larger ash.
Ash.
That’s what his visitor had taken home with him Saturday, a small switch of eastern red cedar and a small baton of ash. There was a den many miles to the south at Warrenton, and a wife who had imagined an accent wall to either side of the fireplace.
Her husband had seen the milling ad on Craigslist, and he arrived Saturday to look around. Like the new pickup truck he arrived in, Mike was huge.
He brought some vague notions of the type of wood his wife wanted for her accent wall, and immediately gravitated toward the aromas and purple hues of cedar. But he took with him that small sample of ash and in the end, it was ash she preferred.
The boom hanging stiffly from the back of the tractor like a lizard’s tail, was linked by heavy chain to a collar of chain link around the trunk and with a touch of the throttle, it lurched away from the thicket.
He took a few moments to cut away the smaller locust and vines that snared the large ash, and the operation seemed to verge on success when the tractor halted unexpectedly.
He pressed the reverse pedal and backed up enough, but the engine again quit cold.
The wood was silent except for the rustling of leaves in the tree tops.
It ended up straddling the unkempt trail and no amount of coaxing could urge the tractor further than a few feet in either direction.
It seemed to end up exactly this way: the purchase of a late model tractor that worked for a while, then quit.
His mechanical aptitude was honed from a decade and a half of coaxing old tractors back to life. It took a certain pragmatic wisdom to sense what could be easily fixed and when to call the onsite repair truck.
From where he waited in the kitchen, he could hear the slow crunching of gravel as the arriving vehicle slowly picked its way down the farm drive. A glance out the window confirmed that the sound was the repair truck and in a moment he sauntered up to where someone inside the cab was waiting.
The repair man responded to the greeting and announced himself as Mitch, which was obvious from the name embroidered on the coveralls.
A motion beyond him through the open cab door suggested he had brought a helper but in a moment, Mitch stood aside to reveal the snout and wagging tail of a nondescript mutt waiting on the driver seat.
“Name?” he asked. “That’s Neumann”.
Neumann’s head dipped a moment from the seat where he seemed fastened and he looked up at his master for a word.
A smaller canine turned his head from the passenger seat, and then there were the two paused on the brink but not daring to jump down from the cab.
“They are welcome” the miller nodded and watched the dogs’ attention shift from him as he talked to Mitch, their master.
The four of them moved upward, the miller hands in pockets against the morning chill, the repairman, bearded and amiable, carrying an armload of electric meters and other diagnostic periphenalia, and their outriders Neumann and Scruff who circled the main expedition as it made its way uphill to the forest where the tractor waited.
As they walked, it transpired that it was Mitch who had come out from Purcellville a few weeks earlier to fix the same problem, although the miller had been occupied with other tasks at the time and had never spoken with him.
The dogs seemed delighted to circle and sniff as the two made their way beneath the tall tulip poplars and triple canopy that, by this time in October, had been shed and rustled as they took the left fork in the trail.
The paw-paws still shone bright green in the morning light amid the umber and straw orchard grass of the trail. It was quiet that morning and the paths were strewn with deadfall brought down by towering winds.
As Mitch went about his task prodding this and that wire inside the engine, the miller amused himself throwing sticks to the dogs who were eager to play.
“It’s the headlights” was a first impression, and the miller had long ago surmised that by the position of the fuse that seemed to burn out occasionally.
Mitch tucked a large screwdriver into the indented cover of the instrument cluster which, when lifted free, revealed the tufts of cedar bark woven together handily and set within behind the speedometer.
“Lookee here” Mitch grinned with some satisfaction as he hooked out the mouse nest with a thick finger.
On the last visit, he had rewired the fuse box with two new fuse holders: it had been a jury-rigged job if ever the miller had seen one.
“Can’t we just replace the fuse box?” asked the miller.
“Got to do the whole wiring harness,” Mitch shook his grave bearded face.
“Can you fix it?”
“Sure.”
In a moment, the tractor roared back to life with Mitch’s hands pinched between panel dash and the chassis housing.
“Shall I drive?”
“Sure” Mitch replied, and in a moment the miller was backing the purring tractor up to the mobile repair truck whose side panels folded down as a workbench.
It was just a little later that Mitch strode down the hill from the wood, joyous dogs in tow at the freedom of novel scents to explore.
Mitch was rubbing his large hands together as they stood together in the bright sunlight.
“Been fixing tractors a while?”
“All my life. Look…”, Mitch said vacantly as he scanned the meadows and treeline of the farm. “…do you hunt this place?”
“…the herd needs to be culled, but my wife doesn’t like killing them….”
“Well, Gerhard’s son…you know Otium Winery?”
“Sure: they are German. We like their pinot gris. We grow it here.”
“Gerhard’s son and I are buddies and we hunt some of the property next to the vineyard. But they are selling it.”
“Awful the way the developers are closing in open forest and taking all the trees. That pushes the herd into the few remaining farms like ours…”
“Well, we’d surely like a place like this, my wife and I”, Mitch continued.
Mitch was warming up.
“Got a business card?” the miller asked. “We don’t normally hunt the place but when my wife goes out of town…”
Then, a comment that piqued the miller’s interest.
“Not to change the subject, but my uncle left me a guitar,” Mitch began his narrative. “I don’t play”.
“What kind?” the miller said, riveted by this discovery.
“Well, he was ornery, a mean drunk, but when he was sober…”
“I like him already,” the miller interjected.
“Gibson Les Paul, an electric”.
The miller’s jaw dropped.
“Sunburst?”
“Yeah, sunburst, a Les Paul from 1960 with original pickups. We had an appraiser look it over, and he wanted fifty bucks, but we thought it was worth it…”
“Geez…” the miller’s eyes widened.
“Well, he said if one of the pickups was white and one was black…”
The miller’s attention focused. “Want to sell it?”
“Two hundred and seventy five thousand, that’s what the appraiser said”, Mitch concluded. “We were thinking, my wife and I, to pay off the house and get a piece of land somewhere where I could hunt whenever I wanted…”
The miller realized from his tone and expression Mitch was not playing on gullibility: he was dead serious. He lifted up the business card Mitch had handed him.
“Will they send the bill?” The miller asked softly.
“Well, they’ll be in touch. Maybe, since I was just out here, they can do something under warranty,” Mitch confided.
The miller shook the card his way as Mitch backed out, the silhouette of the two dogs dark within and the truck eased back up the gravel farm road.