The Last Harvest in the Combine Cab

On the last Saturday of September I let my grandson climb into the buddy seat of a combine I had already sold.

It was not sold the way a man sells a truck, with a handshake in a driveway. It was sold the way a farm gets sold, slowly, and on paper. The auction bill had come back from the printer in Little Falls that week. It was stapled to the corkboard in my kitchen between the feed store calendar and a reminder card from the dentist, and the combine was lot 41 on page two. John Deere 9500, six row corn head, twenty foot bean platform, shed kept. The auctioneer had written “shed kept” himself, and for once I had no corrections.

Tyler stood on the bottom rung of the ladder with his hands in the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt, waiting to be told he could climb. He is my daughter Linda’s boy. He was fifteen that month, tall in the shins and thin in the shoulders, a boy built like a rake handle.

“Go on up,” I said. “Sit on the right side. Not on the floor. Not on the dog.”

Sadie, my heeler, had beaten both of us up the ladder. She was already lying across the buddy seat’s footrest with her chin on her paws. She has ridden every harvest since she was eight weeks old and she considers the cab hers.

Tyler moved her over with his shoe and sat down. He looked at the monitor, the hydrostat lever, the rows of switches I had labeled years ago with strips of white tape, and the windshield that gave onto a hundred acres of soybeans the color of a paper bag.

“It’s smaller than I thought,” he said.

“Everything is, from up here. Wait till you’re in the field.”

That was the whole speech. I had tried out longer ones the night before, with my bad knee propped on a pillow, and by morning every one sounded like a man reading a plaque. So I started the engine instead, and the cab filled with the sound it has made since 1997, and I put the machine in gear.