The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

What That Did to Me

I sat on my shop stool a long while after I hung up.

The sun was coming in the east window and lighting up the dust over the bench, and the combine was standing there under the sheet where I had set it down the night before.

I thought about a little boy in Sioux City taking a paper sack off his head a block from school.

Carrying it under his arm so nobody would see. Coming home and telling his mother it was the best costume, because what else would you tell her.

I had grown up on a farm with not much money, but there was always enough of everything.

Nobody ever laughed at me for anything I wore, because everybody I knew wore the same thing. That is the truth about a small town. It can be cruel, but mostly it is cruel equally.

I did not like what Jared had said in that kitchen. I still don’t. But I understood it a good deal better on Monday morning than I had on Sunday night.

A man who swears he will protect his son from what happened to him is not a bad man. He is a man who is still carrying the sack.

I thought about calling him. I even took my phone out. But I could not think of a single thing to say to a forty-year-old man about his mother’s grocery sacks that he would want to hear from his father-in-law.

So I put the phone back in my pocket and picked up my utility knife.

I was not building it to make a point to Jared. I want to be clear about that, because some people in town tell this story like I set out to shame him, and I didn’t.

I built it because the parade was Saturday, and I had a box, and I did not want to sit home.

And I suppose, if I am honest, I built it because I did not want Brody to think the combine had been a bad idea.

I wanted him to see it go down Main Street once, even if he was standing on the curb in red.

The Second Combine

A combine big enough for a 67-year-old man with bad knees is a different project than one for a first grader.

I had to run the PVC frame from my shoulders down to my hip bones and brace it across the back, or the whole thing would have hung off my neck like a feed sack.

I used the last refrigerator box for the body and went to the appliance store for one more. The young fellow who works there asked me what in the world I was doing with all those boxes.

I told him I was building a combine. He nodded like that made perfect sense. That is northwest Iowa for you.

The body came down from my shoulders to my knees. I cut a hole in the top for my head and arms, so I could reach the flashlights and the candy.

I painted it the same green, two coats this time, because the first coat soaked into the cardboard and dried blotchy.

I made the wheels bigger and yellow, four of them, cut from the box flaps and painted with a little black hub in the middle.

The rear wheels I set smaller than the front ones, the way a real combine sits. Nobody on Main Street would care, but I would have.