The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

For the header I bought one bigger flashlight, the kind the hardware store keeps by the register for power outages, and I set it in the outside point just like Brody’s.

When I clicked it on in the dark shop, it threw light clear across to the far wall.

The grain tank I built bigger too. I used a five-gallon bucket inside it, with the handle taken off, and a lid hinged on with more duct tape. Darlene said it would hold half the candy in town. I said I was not planning to take any candy. She said, “We’ll see.”

I put a little ladder up the side of the cab, painted black. Real combines have one, a steep one you climb to get up to the operator’s seat.

I ran a strip of reflective tape along the back the way you would for road travel, so nobody would hit me in the dark.

It took me five evenings. I was out there until eleven on Friday night, because the auger kept falling off.

Darlene came out at ten thirty in her robe with a cup of decaf and found me lying on the shop floor gluing a paper towel tube.

“Leon,” she said, “if you have a heart attack in a cardboard combine, I am going to tell everyone at the funeral.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

She sat down on my old shop stool and watched me for a while. Then she said, “Brody asked Amy if Grandpa was mad at him.”

I sat up.

“She told him no. She told him Grandpa just likes to build things.” Darlene looked at the big green box on the floor. “He asked if he could still go to your shop sometime.”

I could not say anything to that for a minute. I went back to gluing the auger, and Darlene let me, and after a while she reached over and held the tube in place while it set.

Parade Night

Our town has had a downtown Halloween parade for as long as anyone can remember. It is not big.

Main Street is four blocks long, and they shut it off with sawhorses from the city shop at five thirty, and the kids walk down the middle while the merchants stand in their doorways and hand out candy.

There are 2,400 people in our town, and on parade night it feels like about 2,000 of them are on Main Street.

The Legion sells hot dogs and coffee out of their front window. The Lutheran church has a cider stand. The fire department parks the pumper truck at the far end with the lights going.

It was cold that night, low forties, but clear. The sun had gone down behind the elevator and the whole sky behind it was orange going to purple.

You could see your breath. It smelled like leaves and somebody’s woodstove and hot dogs from the Legion.

I parked my truck on the side street by the elevator, past the end of the parade route.

Darlene helped me get the frame onto my shoulders in the back of the truck bed, where nobody could see. It took both of us and a good amount of language, mostly mine.

Brody’s little combine was still in the truck bed, under the sheet. I had never taken it out.

I had thought about putting it in the shop a dozen times, and each time I left it. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want to admit I was done with it.

Darlene buttoned my barn coat up under the box, because it was going to be cold walking, and set my camo cap straight on my head.

She looked me up and down, the green and the yellow and the flashlight and the grain tank sticking up behind my shoulders.

“You look ridiculous,” she said.

Then she kissed me, right there by the elevator, and that is more than she usually does in public.

“I’ll be on the curb by the café,” she said. “Don’t fall down.”