The Empty Seat in Merle’s Combine

She made the turn so cleanly that I turned in my seat to see if I had imagined it.

“Not bad,” I said.

“Grandpa would’ve said I left some in the corner.”

“Your grandfather said that to me in 1998,” I said. “I was right to tell him to go and get it himself.”

She laughed out loud, a short bark, surprised at herself.

We cut for twenty-five minutes before the hopper filled. I’d forgotten how fast a combine takes a person’s whole attention. The world shrinks down to the header and the pass and the sound. You stop thinking. That, I believe, is part of why Merle loved it.

When she stopped at the end of the field, a tandem grain truck was already waiting at the approach, with a thin tall boy named Cody at the wheel. He was Dwight’s hired man, the one who had brought the drill in the spring. “Dwight says you owe him two pies,” he said, and backed up under the unloading auger. Abby swung the auger out over the box and engaged it, and the beans poured gold and rattling into the truck, a hundred and eighty bushels in about three minutes.

She plugged the feeder house at three o’clock.

It was the thing I had been dreading. The engine bogged, and the steady rattle stopped all at once as if the machine had choked. Dust rolled up around the cab. The lights on the monitor went red.

She froze with both hands on the wheel.

“Shut it down,” I said.

She didn’t move.

“Abby.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did something wrong, I went too fast.”

“You went three and a half. You did nothing wrong. A tangle of weeds in the row can plug anybody. Header on the ground. Disengage. Engine off.”

Her hand found each lever like she was reading aloud. Then she pulled the key out and held it in her fist.

We climbed down together. Her face was tight and pale under the cap. I showed her the plug: a wad of green foxtail and bean vines wrapped around the feeder house chain like hair in a drain.

I handed her a pair of gloves and my pocketknife, and I held the key. She worked at it for twenty minutes. I did not help. I told her where to cut and where not to pull. When she finally freed the last of it and the wad dropped out in her hand, I saw her shoulders let go.

“That’s all it is?” she said. “That’s the whole thing I was so scared of?”

“Every combine in the world does it,” I said. “The first time is the worst.”

She stood there with the tangle in her hands. “Grandpa did this every day.”

“Twice a day, some days.”

“He never complained.”

“He complained constantly,” I said. “He just never complained to you.”

She laughed again, and we climbed back up.

By Sunday afternoon we had cut the whole north eighty and most of the east eighty.

At noon that day, Kurt came out. He had told me he would be on a pole near Groton all weekend, because a line had come down in a windstorm up there. But the crew finished early, and he parked in the approach to the east field with his hard hat on the dashboard and walked to the fence and stood with his arms on the top wire.

I saw him from the little seat. I did not say anything to Abby. She was too deep in the pass.