The Empty Seat in Merle’s Combine

He was in his recliner that day, by then so thin the cushions swallowed him. Abby had come out with a cake, and we sang, and he gave her a card with a fifty dollar bill. As she was leaving he caught her sleeve and said, “Come October, young lady.”

I had thought he meant the driver’s license. I had thought he was just old and tired and confused about the dates.

“I knew what he meant,” Abby said, as if she had followed my thinking right out of my head. “I didn’t say anything, because he was so sick. I didn’t want to make him feel bad that he wouldn’t be able to.”

Her face was perfectly steady. It was the steadiness of somebody who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has decided not to put it down in front of company.

“I don’t want a stranger in his seat, Gram,” she said.

It was precisely what I had been unable to say to anyone.

“Abby, that combine will take a hand off,” I said. “It doesn’t care who’s in it. It’s not a tractor. It’s twelve tons.”

“I know. I read the operator’s manual.” She said it a little defensively, and then she added, “Twice. Grandpa gave me his copy when I was fourteen.”

Of course he had.

I think I was just tired of being the only one in the family who couldn’t put a foot on that ladder, and here was a girl in church shoes who could.

“Your folks would have to say yes,” I said. “Both of them.”

“They won’t,” said Abby. “Not at first.”

She was right about that.

Kurt drove out that night after work, still in his co-op jacket, and Renee came with him. We sat around the kitchen table with coffee, nobody touching the bars Renee had brought.

Kurt’s first word was “No.” He said it kindly, the way you say it to somebody you love who has just proposed putting a hand in a running machine.

“Mom, she’s sixteen. I’ve been in that cab a thousand times and I wouldn’t run it.”

Renee, who teaches fourth grade in Aberdeen and has the calmest voice of any person I know, laid both hands flat on the table. “I’m not saying she can’t do it. I’m saying I need to know what happens when something goes wrong. Because something will. Something always does on a farm.”

That was fair. I had been thinking about it for three days.

“Then here’s what I propose,” I said. “Nobody touches the combine till the beans are ready. That gives us three weeks, near enough. In those three weeks I teach her the machine from the ground up before she ever turns a key. How to walk around it. How to grease it. How to shut it down and get out. She doesn’t cut a bean until I say. And when she does, I’m sitting right beside her in the little seat. Every round. Every day.”

“What about your shoulder?” Kurt said.

“I won’t be driving the combine. I’ll be talking.”

“You’ve never talked less in your life than when you were in that cab with Dad,” he said, and then he stopped, because it was the first time in a month that any of us had laughed in that kitchen.

Renee looked at Abby. “Is this what you want? Not what Grandpa wanted. What you want.”

“Yes,” said Abby.