I was pretty good. I could tell the size of a bolt just looking at it, especially a nine sixteenths. That was kind of my favorite I guess. It was the wrench size I imagined and counted forward or backward from when i looked at a bolt. I think most people keyed off the half inch wrench - even my dad, i think, who could tell a bolt size just by getting his fingers on it. But mine was the nine sixteenths.
We had this machine we pulled behind the tractor that looked like God's own little back scratcher. A cultivator. There were eighteen or so of these flat steel arms about two foot high that reached down from the contraption to scrape along the ground. Attached to the tip of each of these was a winged spade that measured six inches tip to tip. They were sharped edged and angled just enough to get under the weeds but not so they'd dig too deep. Well, it seemed that these little devils would pull through about a hundred acres of Iowa topsoil before they either broke or were worn into stubby, ineffective versions of their former selves.
It was still Spring and when I got home from school I could see the box from the top of the driveway - not that we had a very long driveway. I think I could see it because I was looking for it. It was heavier than a cardboard box should be. And it contained things that seemed better suited to a wood crate. But there it was straight from the John Dealer - the local John Deere dealership - this soggy box full of new spades and bright new bolts and nuts sitting next to the cultivator in the grass. For these few weeks of the year we used the cultivator it seemed to sit straight up just waiting to be hooked up and pulled through the field. The rest of the year it just sagged in a dusty hibernation in the back of the shed.
You could open the box with the kind of knife I had in my pocket. I dropped the books out of my hands. Knelt down and ran a small blade through the plastic binders and the lid practically sprang open. Inside were eighteen fresh replacement spades. Each was held fast to the cultivator with two nine sixteenths bolts and nuts. I replaced them all.
