The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

Main Street

I waited until most of the little ones had started down the street. I did not want to be at the front, and I did not want anybody to think I was trying to make a show.

I just walked in toward the back, behind a pack of fourth graders dressed as ghosts.

I clicked my headlight on at the first corner.

The first thing I heard was a little girl on the curb, maybe three years old, yelling, “Mama! A tractor!” Her mother laughed and said, “That’s a combine, honey,” because this is northwest Iowa and even the three-year-olds’ mothers know the difference.

Then the laughing started, and it spread down the curb ahead of me. But it was good laughing. I want to be clear about that.

It was not the kind of laughing Jared was afraid of. It was the kind people do when somebody they know has done something foolish on purpose and done it well.

“Leon Schultz!” somebody yelled from the bank steps. “Is that you in there?”

“Nobody else,” I said.

Dale Johnson, who I have known since we were both in Mrs. Miller’s second grade, hollered from in front of the Legion with a hot dog in his hand. “What’s she yield, Leon?”

“Depends who’s driving,” I said, and the men in front of the Legion all laughed, and a couple of them saluted me with their coffee cups.

Phones came up all along the curb. I could see the little screens lighting up faces in the dusk.

The bank teller who has handled my account for twenty years held hers up and waved at me with the other hand. The pastor’s wife from our church was laughing so hard she had to hold onto the parking meter.

I walked slow, because that combine was not built for speed and neither am I.

Kids ran up to me and peered at the flashlight and asked if the grain tank was real. I lifted the lid and let them look in at the empty bucket.

That turned out to be a mistake, or a blessing, depending on how you look at it. Within a block, kids were dropping candy into my grain tank.

One handful, then another. A little boy dressed as a hot dog put in a whole box of Milk Duds and ran off before I could give it back.

“I’m not supposed to be collecting,” I told a lady in a witch hat.

“You’re a combine,” she said. “You’re supposed to be harvesting.”

I could not argue with that.