Bertie, Don't Leave

Some notes from my autobiographical novel, We Found the Vacuum Cleaner.

Well, it looks like Bertie has finally served all the pies she’s going to. This morning, she mentioned retirement for the first time I know of. When the fateful day is, I’m not sure, but on that day, Pancake Flats will flutter away like a balloon losing its air. I don’t know if I want to be here when that happens. Even My First Wife Chancie, who’s been in there only once, says this town won’t be the same any more.

Now, Bertie always closed on New Years, the 4th of July and Christmas Day, but the rest of the time, there was never a weekday went by that most of us didn’t gather up in Bertie’s to talk about everything from A to Z and one to a hundred.

We only had one discussion that ever changed the world, though. It was old man Ferguson who first brought it up. He came stomping into Bertie’s early one June morning back in the 70s. He had just left a load of wheat at the grain elevator. He looked madder than the day his wife came back. I flinched when he flung his oily, red gimme cap across the diner and hollered, “I ain’t getting out there another day till somebody figures out how to air condition my combine! Hoo, boy! It’s hot! And cool down my tractors, too! And my truck!”

Well, we discussed that one, yes we did. It just so happened that a red-headed John Deere salesman was in there that day. His name was Dennis. He didn’t say a word, but we sure were proud when he came back to town a few years later riding in an air-conditioned tractor. That’s the only day I know of that we didn’t spend the morning at Bertie’s. We let old man Ferguson have the first ride. He scrambled up into that gleaming all-glass, air-conditioned cab and stood there waving and grinning and strutting. (I never have figured out how he did that strutting inside the cab.) He finally sat down and drove it up to 3rd Street and back. Then he walked around it, patted its tires, looked up at the cab again as proud as if he’d just delivered a brand new calf. Dennis, the red-headed salesman followed him around, grinning right along side him, beckoning the rest of us to drive it.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” Ferguson said proudly. “Ain’t this something! Cool as a cucumber in there! And it’s got a radio, too!” Then with a wide smile that showed his several missing teeth, he added, “I believe I could recommend this one, yes, sir!” He spit some snuff juice off to one side, then bowed his head and quietly said, “But I’m too old now.”

A week later his picture was in the Waddle County Weekly. He was waving from the cab. We cut his picture out and taped it to the back of Bertie’s cash register. He was awful proud of that picture.

Then a month after that he auctioned off his farm and settled into a cabin next to a Colorado trout lake.

For the record, three years later, Lester Flake bought the first air-conditioned combine around Pancake Flats. Now, of course, everybody has one—except me.

Old man Ferguson passed away several years ago; Lester Flake got a bad case of Alzheimer’s—such a sad thing to a fine man—that red-headed salesman got transferred to the Big City and now Bertie is thinking…