When I took the flowers down to my father’s grave, I got to the cemetery and remembered that, “Oh, yeah, there is no pump here.” This was not a big problem because I knew that my cousin Duane lived just down the road.

The cemetery was on a paved, narrow county road with zigs and zags because it was first a road long before surveyors came and it would veer around whatever obstacle had been there, or maybe because it followed the high ground like the Indians did.

This road continued a wee bit and then became a gravel road. Can you imagine the plume of dust that follows a car on such a road? Well, it was my car on that road and I saw that dust following me like a haboob.

I knew Duane and his wife would be at the house by the cemetery because about a month before he had been RUN OVER BY A TRACTOR. He was 84 when it happened and will be 85 this month. He remembers his mom and Daddy’s other three sisters gathering at the house and crying when my father went overseas to WWII.

Phyllis, Duane’s wife, was making  – as in actual homemade – waffle cones for the little diner near by that served iced cream when we got there; but not to worry, she was on the last one. There is something comforting about entering a home where things like that are done.

Duane was on the sofa watching a baseball game, not a bad way to spend the summer, but not really what he would have chosen. Duane’s family has been in farming since at least before his paternal grandfather, and in just about the same area. He doesn’t just use and discard and that is why he was on a 60 year-old tractor that he felt had a little more life in it.

If a tractor could think, it might have disagreed because it kept dying. Duane kept climbing off and crawling under it and fiddling with some component and then continued pulling fence posts. And, one time – the last time for that day, he either forgot to take it out of gear or he jostled the gearshift getting down.

So, after some fiddling from underneath, the engine caught and ran for ten seconds, long enough to run over his right thigh, his collarbone, his back and pin his right hand under a wheel. Fortunately, there had been so much rain that the ground gave way and he got mushed into the mud more than being squashed between hard dirt and tractor wheels.

Of course, he is still outside and under a tractor and his phone is in his right pocket. He managed to reach across with his left hand and get the phone, but the sun was glaring on the screen. So he figured the last person he had called was Phyllis and chanced that option. He was right. His message: Come get me.

I could get detailed now, but it’s probably better if you just imagine the scene with Phyllis wanting to call 911 and Duane saying, Nah, he was okay. They got a neighbor, then I think another one, and got the tractor off him, put him into the car, got back to the house and his daughters got there and decided to call the paramedics, who talked among themselves and airlifted him to Indianapolis.

Cat scans, MRI’s and all sorts of tests and they finally discovered his leg was bruised, his hand bruised, his collarbone broken and two vertebra in his back were cracked. So it was send him home to heal with the admonishment it would take a while because he was older. Not bad for an 84/85 year-old.

And it being the summer, it won’t interfere too much with his practice of attending the local high school basketball games. One of my first bedtime stories, by the way, was “The Night Duane Broke his Arm Playing Basketball.”

So, I got my water from Phyllis in a Prairie Farms milk container and went to the cemetery . . . and I keep that container in my trunk to remember my dad and my links to my family in Fountain County and waffle cones and farm neighbors and old tractors.