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The tractor allows and empowers my personal participation in the rhythms of the natural world. I can plant and pick, harrow and harvest generous crops in season. To me, my tractor seems a heroic thing.

But in the field of farm tractors, my Deere is as small as they run. Even if you're not a farmer, you've seen tractors twice and thrice the power of mine commonly plowing the dark Midwestern soil. And on the larger tracts, you've seen modern behemoths cut swaths as wide as avenues through dustier fields, wearing double tires on every wheel, pulling several gangs of plows and harrows, while the operator sits bunkered in an air-conditioned cab, watching the tracks of his tires in a television monitor.

Me, I take the weather on my head. I mow at a width of six feet. And mine is but a two-bottom plow.

Nevertheless, as small as my tractor is, smaller still was the first tractor purchased by my father-in-law, Martin Bohlmann, in the late 1940s when his daughter Ruthanne was six years old.

There were eight of us at the table, though it could accommodate 15 at least. Martin and Gertrude had borne 14 children. They buried one in infancy and now had watched nearly all the others leave for college.

The farmer bowed his head. We prayed and began to eat. Potatoes and vegetables had been raised in the kitchen garden. Popcorn, too. Milk came from their own cows. There had been a time when the hog had been hung up on a chilly autumn morning and butchered in the barn door to become cracklings, hams, chops, sausages, lard. The Bohlmanns didn't own the land they worked or the house they slept in. They rented. They never paid income tax, since their annual income never approached a taxable figure. For them it was a short distance from the earth to their stomachs and back to earth again. "Thanne" remembers when they had no plumbing.

We consumed our supper mostly in silence. Then, at the end of the meal, Martin put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, read a brief devotion, pushed back his chair, stood up, and walked outside. I followed as far as the porch. In twilight the farmer, clad in clean coveralls, strolled westward into the field immediately beyond the house. He paused. He stood in silhouette, the deep green sky framing his body with such precision that I could see the toothpick twiddling in his lips. His hair was as stiff and wild as a thicket, his nose majestic.

Slowly, Martin knelt down on one knee. He gathered some soil in his right hand and squeezed and sifted the dirt through his fingers to the palm of his left. Suddenly he brought both hands to his face and sniffed. He switched the toothpick. He touched the tip of his tongue to the earth. Then he rose again, softly clapping his two hands clean and slipping them behind the bib of the coveralls. He stood there, Martin Bohlmann, gazing across the field, black as iron in the gloaming, his elbows forming the joints of folded wings—and I thought, How peaceful! How completely peaceful is this man.

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4