The Cardboard Combine on Main Street
The Build
Brody had wanted to be a combine since August. That was the month I took him out to the Peterson place and let him ride in the cab while young Kyle Peterson ran my old ground.
I sold the machinery when I retired, but Kyle rents the 480 acres, and he lets me ride along when I ask.
Kyle had the corn head on that day, testing it before the beans came off.
Brody sat on my lap in the buddy seat and watched the snouts go down the rows, and he did not say one word for twenty minutes. For that boy, twenty minutes of quiet is a record.
When we climbed down, he looked back up at that big green machine and said, “Grandpa, I want to be that for Halloween.”
I told him I’d see what I could do. Darlene heard me say it and gave me a look across the yard that said she knew exactly how much of October I was about to spend in the shop.
I farmed for forty-one years. I ran a combine every fall from the time I was twenty-two until I was sixty-three.
I know what one looks like from every side, and I know a six-year-old does not care about any of that. He cares if the lights work.
So I started with the lights. I bought two of the little LED flashlights at the hardware store, the kind with a push button on the end, and I worked out how to mount them in a header so he could reach back and click them on himself.
The body came from two refrigerator boxes the appliance store let me haul off. Good heavy cardboard, the double-wall kind.
I cut it with a utility knife on my workbench and scored the folds with the back of a butter knife so they would bend clean.
A cardboard box on a little boy’s shoulders will rub him raw in about a block. I’ve seen it.
So I built a frame inside out of half-inch PVC pipe, glued at the joints, that sat on his shoulders and carried the weight down to his hips instead of his neck.
For straps I cut up a pair of my own old suspenders, the wide kind with the clips.
Darlene said I had worn those suspenders to every Farm Bureau meeting since 1985 and it was about time they did something useful.
I went through three rolls of duct tape. I bought a quart of green paint, the deep green you know if you have ever lived near a field, and a little can of yellow for the wheels.
No letters on it, no deer, nothing like that. Just the colors.
The header was the hard part. I made it out of a piece of the second box folded into a wedge, with four little points cut along the front like a corn head’s snouts.
The flashlights went in the two outside points, so they shone right where the rows would be.
The grain tank I built on his back out of a square cut-down shipping box with a hinged lid.
Inside I glued a plastic ice cream pail so the candy would not fall through the cardboard. I put a little unloading auger on the side made of a paper towel tube painted yellow.
It took me three weeks of evenings. I would eat supper, wipe my mouth, and go out to the shop.
Darlene would bring me coffee around eight and stand in the doorway and shake her head at me.
“You haven’t worked this hard since the harvest of ’93,” she said one night.
That was the wet year, when the river came up and we were still picking corn the week before Thanksgiving with the ground half froze.
She was not wrong. I was out there until ten some nights getting the wheels to sit right.
When it was done, I set it on my workbench and turned the flashlights on with the shop lights off. Darlene came out to see it. She stood there a while and then she said, “Leon, that boy is going to lose his mind.”