The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

The Rest of the Way

We walked the last two blocks together. Brody went in front, in his small combine, steering with both hands on an imaginary wheel and making the engine noise.

I went behind him like a second machine in the field, the way you run two combines on a big farm.

Jared walked beside us. He didn’t wear anything. He just walked with his hands in his coat pockets, and every so often he reached over and fixed the flashlight that kept flopping loose on Brody’s header.

The crowd went up all along the curb. People were laughing and clapping and holding their phones up. Kids ran out and dropped candy in Brody’s grain tank and in mine. The pastor’s wife cried. Dale Johnson yelled, “Now that’s a harvest crew!”

Brody waved at all of them. He was not embarrassed. He was the happiest I have ever seen him, and I have seen him on Christmas morning.

Nobody laughed at him the way his dad was afraid of. Not one child.

I watched Jared watch him. I watched him see it. His boy had stood on that curb in a forty-dollar suit, with every reason to stay put, and he had chosen to run into the street for a cardboard box. Nobody made him. His dad watched him choose it.

At the end of the route, by the pumper truck, the firemen let Brody honk the horn. Then Jared helped me get the frame off my shoulders.

It took both of us. He held it while I ducked out, and for a minute we stood there in the red lights holding a cardboard combine between us.

“My mom made my costumes,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. “Out of grocery sacks.”

“Amy told me,” I said. “I hope that’s all right.”

He nodded. “I used to take them off before I got to school. I never told her that. She died when I was twenty-six.” He looked at Brody, who was showing a fireman his flashlights. “I thought I was saving him from something.”

“You were trying to,” I said. “That counts for something.”

“It made him cry, Leon.” His voice cracked on my name. “I made my kid cry over a costume, and you built a whole other one so he wouldn’t think his was a mistake.”

I didn’t tell him he was wrong about that. He wasn’t.

“He’s a good boy,” I said. “And you’re a good dad. You just had a bad Sunday.”

He laughed a little at that, the first time all night. Then he went over and picked Brody up, combine and all, and carried him on his hip to the car.