The Shed Full of Tractors Nobody Could Put a Price On

The shed my wife called my second marriage

I farmed a stretch of maize and a few hundred head of cattle outside Reitz, in the eastern Free State, for most of my working life, and somewhere along the way I started collecting tractors. Not new ones. Old ones. The first was a grey Ferguson that my father bought in 1958, the year before I was born, and when he passed I could not bring myself to sell it, so it sat in the shed and I told myself I would restore it one day. Then a neighbour was clearing out an estate and there was a Fordson that needed a new head, and after that a John Deere that had been left out in a vlei for so long the birds had nested in the exhaust. My wife, Hannetjie, used to stand at the kitchen window with her coffee and watch me walk down to the shed in the early light, and she would say, with no real cruelty in it, that the shed was my second marriage.

By the time I turned sixty-five there were six of them in there. Three I had got running, properly running, so that on a good Saturday I could take a grandchild on my knee and put-put down the farm road with the whole valley smelling of diesel and cut grass. The other three were projects, which is a word men like me use for things we will probably never finish. I knew every bolt. I knew which one leaked and where, and which seat had been reupholstered by a saddler in Bethlehem who has since died. What I did not know, and this is the honest centre of the whole story, was what any of it was worth.

The afternoon the three of them sat at my table

I have three children. Pieter farms with me now, more than I do these days if I am honest. Marina is a schoolteacher in Bloemfontein and has no interest in a spanner. The youngest, Dirk, works in Johannesburg in something to do with computers that I have given up trying to understand. They love each other, my three, but they are not the same, and I had watched too many farming families tear themselves to pieces over who got what when the old man was gone. I had buried a friend whose sons stopped speaking over a hay baler. A hay baler. So one Sunday after lunch I asked the three of them to stay at the table, and I said that I wanted to sort out the tractors while I was still here to hear the arguing.

It did not go the way I imagined. I had pictured a civilised conversation. Instead Pieter said the grey Ferguson should obviously stay on the farm, which was fair, but then Marina said that if Pieter kept the Ferguson then the running ones were worth a great deal and she and Dirk should get something to balance it, and Dirk, who had been quiet, said that nobody at the table actually knew what the things were worth, so how could anyone say what was fair. And he was right. We were all throwing numbers across the mutton like we knew, and not one of us knew. I had a figure in my head for the Ferguson that was pure sentiment. Pieter had a figure that was pure optimism. Marina had found something vaguely similar on a website and was treating it like gospel.

That was the moment I understood that love was not going to be enough. We needed a number that none of us had made up.

Learning the difference between a price and a feeling

I am a stubborn man, and my first instinct was to work it out myself. I spent two evenings with a notebook and the internet, and all I managed to do was confuse myself and get cross. A tractor in America is not a tractor in the Free State. A tractor with a documented history is not the same as one you found in a vlei. Condition, provenance, whether it runs, whether the parts still exist in the country, all of it mattered, and I had no framework for any of it. I was doing with machinery exactly what I would never do with my cattle, which is guess.

It was Dirk, the computer one, who said the word that changed the whole thing. He said we needed proper valuations, done by someone whose job it actually was, so that whatever number we ended up with could not be accused of belonging to any one of us. I remember feeling something loosen in my chest when he said it. Of course. You do not ask the family to agree on a price. You bring in someone from outside who does this for a living and let the number be the number.

I will be honest that I had always thought of that sort of work as something for big companies and insurance claims, not for an old man and his hobby in a shed. But when I looked into it, I found that there are people who assess all manner of movable assets, plant and equipment and machinery and collections, and that proper valuators will come and look at the actual thing in front of them rather than a photograph on a screen. That mattered to me more than I can easily explain. These were not abstractions. They were my father's Ferguson and the Fordson with the new head. I wanted someone to put a hand on them.

The man who put a hand on my father's Ferguson

He came on a Tuesday, a quiet fellow with a clipboard and the kind of patience I recognised from good stock inspectors. He did not rush. He asked about each machine, listened when I told him the story of the saddler in Bethlehem, took his photographs, made his notes, checked things I would not have thought to check. He was not sentimental and he was not dismissive either. He treated the shed with a sort of respect that I had not expected, and when he was finished he explained how he arrived at his figures, and why the running ones carried the value they did, and why one of my so-called projects was worth rather less than I had hoped and another rather more. I did not agree with every number in my heart. But I could not argue with a single one in my head, and that was the whole point.

What struck me afterwards was how much calmer I felt. For years the shed had carried a low hum of worry underneath the pleasure, because I knew that one day it would become a problem for the children, and I had been quietly dreading it. Now there was a document. Now there was a figure that came from a person whose standing to give it did not depend on being my son or my daughter. I learned, reading up afterwards, that genuinely certified valuators carry a professional accountability that an opinion around a lunch table never can, and that is exactly why the number holds.

What we did with the number

We sat again, the three of us and me, with the report in the middle of the table where the argument had been. Pieter kept the grey Ferguson, as he should. The value of it was set against his share of everything else, the land included, so that Marina and Dirk were not short-changed for the sake of my sentiment. One of the running John Deeres is going to Dirk, who swears he will learn to look after it, and I have decided to believe him. Marina, who wanted no machine, took her share another way. There was no shouting. There was, at one point, a bit of laughing, because Dirk worked out that his childhood estimate of the Fordson had been wildly wrong in both directions over the years.

I still go down to the shed in the early light. Hannetjie still watches from the window with her coffee. Nothing about the pleasure has changed. What changed is the worry underneath it, and I did not realise how heavy that had become until it was gone. I thought, when I started, that getting the tractors valued was an admission that I was getting old and sorting out my affairs. It turned out to be the opposite. It was the thing that let me enjoy them again, free of the quiet dread, knowing that when I am gone my children will reach for a piece of paper instead of each other's throats. That is worth more than any of the six machines, and for once I know exactly what I am talking about.