The Combine She Drove Home

What Merv Did

I didn’t see the next part. I was on the creek road doing eleven miles an hour with my flashers on. But Merv told me, and later Colby told me, and their stories matched, so I believe them both.

Merv shut the tractor off and climbed down slow, because his knees are seventy years old. He stood there with him for a minute and watched the combine go down the road.

“Well,” Merv said. “You’re done for the day.”

Colby kicked at the stubble. “She can’t do this. I’ve got the Hofers Monday and the Schmidts after that and the Kroeker place. I’ve got four hundred acres left.”

“You got a phone?” Merv said.

“Yeah.”

“Then you’d better call them,” Merv said. “Tell them their beans will wait.”

Colby said a word I won’t repeat. Merv let him. Then Merv said, “Sit down on the step of my tractor, son. I want to tell you about the fall of 1998.”

The Fall Of 1998

I know this story better than anyone, so let me tell you what Merv told him. He told it shorter, but it was the same story.

In September of 1998, Lowell fell off the ladder of our grain bin. He was going up to check the level and his boot slipped on a wet rung, and he came down eleven feet onto the concrete and broke his leg in two places. It was a week before harvest.

We were twenty-six and twenty-three years old. We owed money on everything. We had borrowed against the ground to buy a used combine, a much older one than the one I was driving home, and if the crop didn’t come out, we would lose all of it.

Lowell sat in a recliner with his leg in a cast up to his hip and cried, the only time in thirty-two years I ever saw him cry before the day his mother died. He said we were finished.

I said we weren’t.

I had grown up on a farm. I had driven grain trucks since I was fourteen. I had never run a combine in my life, but I had watched one my whole childhood, and I knew how to listen to a machine.

So Lowell sat in a lawn chair at the edge of the field with his crutches across his lap, and he yelled instructions at me for two days, and on the third day he stopped yelling and just watched.

I cut all six hundred acres that fall. Corn and beans. I ran that old combine from the end of September to the middle of November. Merv ran grain cart for me on Saturdays, because he was done with his own by then, and he wouldn’t take a dime for it.

And I was pregnant with Colby the whole time. I didn’t know it until October.