The Green Notebook
Part One: The Tractor
Grandpa lost most of his hearing in the fall of 2019.
He was working on an old John Deere 4020 in the machine shed, the same tractor his father had bought new in 1966. He’d rebuilt the engine himself, twice. That October afternoon, he was standing beside it with the hood open, listening for a knock, when something inside let go.
The engine blew with a sound I heard from the house, a quarter mile away. It was like a cannon going off inside a tin can.
I was twenty that year, home from community college for the weekend. My grandmother, Bea, was in the kitchen making apple butter. We looked at each other, and then we were both running.
Grandpa was sitting on the floor of the machine shed with his back against a hay bale. There was oil on his face and his shirt. He was blinking slowly, like a man waking from a nap.
He wasn’t hurt anywhere we could see. But when Grandma knelt down and said his name, he didn’t turn his head.
He just watched her lips move.
The doctors in Lincoln said the blast had damaged both of his eardrums and the tiny nerves behind them. Some of it would heal. Most of it wouldn’t.
My grandfather, Henry Larkin, was seventy-seven years old. He had farmed six hundred and forty acres of corn and soybeans outside of Beatrice, Nebraska, for fifty-five years. And now the world had gone quiet.
That part of the story is true.
Everything my family believed about it after that was not.
My name is Katie Larkin. I’m twenty-six now.
My mother was Grandpa’s younger daughter, Susan. She died in a car accident when I was eleven, on an icy stretch of Highway 77 on her way home from a nursing shift. My father wasn’t in the picture. So I moved to the farm, and Grandma and Grandpa raised me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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