I’d been trashing Ralph’s farm all morning, and just before noon, Ralph pulled up, his baby-blue, four-door, long-as-a-hearse Oldsmobile sedan silently appearing alongside the trash pile. By then, the crew and I had destroyed nearly everything. I walked over to Ralph. Instead of rolling down the window, he threw open the door and stuck a large leg out onto the dirt. Pants that reached up mid-calf exposed pasty ankles, sagging socks, penny loafers. His gut rolled up over his waistband, bunched on his lap; pudgy arms and hard-bitten fingers thick as quarter-rolls rested on the steering wheel; respirator tubes traced a lapping chin and ended with a fixture that metronomed oxygen into his nostrils. Tank in the passenger seat. Oblong, murky eyes.

“Been here most my life,” Ralph said, his voice like a broken green bottle.

Finally, at seventeen years old—after years of harassing PE teachers, ex’s fathers, and unrelenting friends—the dissention got to me. Scanning across the parsed wreckage, hands in my pockets, I was tired of being the boss’s son. I wanted to say, Look Ralph, I’m not doing this. It’s not my fault you didn’t buy more land, or finance your sons, or get your crops to make grade. And I’m sure you’re getting paid way more than this bottomland ground is worth. You know how much I’m making here? Six bucks an hour. That’s right, and I’m the boss’s son. It’s not like I’m building overtop this joint, or hooking up my brand-new truck to your horse trailer, is it? I’m just doing as I’m told, taking my lumps, trying to get ahead. You, as well as anyone, should understand that.

But instead I just stood, gruff and quiet. Ralph didn’t say anything, but looked over his bowdlerized plot, a place where he’d clocked thousands of hours, taught life-lessons, ate meals leaned up against pickups and tractors.

When I returned to work, he said, “You ain’t gonna burn all them tires?”

“My dad told me to burn everything.”

“Those tires are still good. I know a hundred guys who’ll need tires come harvest. Every week I have a guy or two stopping by, asking for tires.”

I stared at the mismatched slicks, knowing tires like those were liable to cause death.

“You mind setting them aside?” Ralph said. “I’ll get a guy to come for them.”

I said nothing.

Ralph’s stare carried to the fields he had worked for decades, glazing out to the creaking, rusted bone-yard. I imagine his mind filled with memories of a wife having brought a lunch of fried chicken, a green apple, thick bread, cold water in mason jars, and riding along with him for a pass on the wheel well; of a son who jumped the clutch as Ralph hucked a bale up onto the truck, only to have it tumble off and break, wasted; of late moonlit nights changing water accompanied only by the purling and breathing of the siphon tubes, and of thirsty dirt.

I said, “Yeah, we’ll save them, why not?”

Ralph nodded. He sat with his door open and watched me roll the tires one by one toward the canal bank, where I stacked them.

“Get that old pickup there. Throw them in back.”

Fragments of the farm had covered some of the tires, and I struggled to rip them from the intertwined posts and wire. Ralph saw me struggling with one knobby, rimless shell. He bonked the horn, calling me over.

“Dig around back there and find yourself something useful.”

I opened the back door and found tools everywhere, on the floor, the seat, in the cracks towards the trunk, the thin sill below the rectangular window. I began to sift: pipe wrenches, crescent wrenches, monkey wrenches, hammers; hatchets, metrics, sockets, files; three-eighths, five-eighths, seven-eighths—and then a pair of shiny, red-handled, slip-jointed pliers, large and heavy, the handles nine-inches long, constructed of glistening metal, with a thick rivet holding everything together. When I picked them out and showed them to Ralph, he grunted an approval.

I gripped the pliers and tried to pry the wire loose from the tire, but with Ralph’s eyes on me, the tool fumbled in my fingers. I dropped the pliers more than once and finally resorted to operating the tool two-handed, chomping away as if I had reverted to an inexperienced adolescent under the straight gaze of a father. The tire came free, and the rest were easy to detach. I finished and returned to Ralph, tried to give the tool back.

“No, no. You’ll need them again.”

I lied and said I had a pair of my own.

“Just keep them for the day. I ain’t gonna use them.”

I stuck the pliers in my back pocket, the heft pulling my pants down that much further, and walked off to help the others. A few minutes later, I saw the exhaust cough out of the Olds and watched Ralph chuff across the bridge and down the road.

My father came back with propellant and matches, and I told him of the tires. Sometimes people just can’t let go, we reasoned together.

So I scaled up the leaning garbage pile with two jugs of diesel and my pocketed pliers. I sloshed out the fuel and watched it pool on the boards and soak into the poles. And about the time that my father loaded up the farmhands and the shovels and pry bars—about the time that Ralph stumbled into his cramped house and fell into a worn recliner—I struck the match, then the second, the third, until the flames whipped close, and the heat made me stumble back from the pyre and shield my face.

I spent the afternoon digging a line around the silo and bashing out flames that caught the weeds along the ditch bank. Halfheartedly, I looked out to the road whenever I heard a vehicle, wondering if Ralph had the brass to see his place dissipate into oily smoke.

In the final hours of the dim, gray day, I remember that soothing sound of the canal lapping along, the pops and hisses of the coals left from posts and planks. I recall the smell the smoldering tar, the manure, and, above all else, my own mephitic reek.