The Combine I Drove for Dad

The Night I Could Not Sleep

I got home near eleven. My wife, Denise, had the coffee on because she knows me, and she sat down across the table and she said, “What are you going to do.”

Because she knew I was going to do something. She had seen my face in that hallway Tuesday.

I told her the idea that had come to me on the state route. I was going to drive Dad home. Not in the hearse, that was the funeral home’s part and that was fine. But from the church to the cemetery, I was going to lead the whole procession myself in his combine, the big green nine-series he had babied for ten years, the one he died in the seat of, with the corn head folded up for the road.

And I was going to call every farmer in the county who had a tractor and ask them to fall in behind me.

Denise did not tell me I was crazy. She has been married to me twenty years and she knew better. She said, “Will Paulette let you.”

“Paulette has the church and the preacher and the fellowship hall,” I said. “She does not have the road, and she does not have the combine. The combine is half mine.”

That was true. Dad and I had bought that machine together, both our names on the note at the Farm Credit, because a nine hundred acre operation needs a serious combine and neither of us could swing it alone. Paulette could bury him however she wanted inside that church. The road between the church and the Zion cemetery was mine as much as anybody’s.

I called Ray first, up in Findlay. I woke him up. I told him what I wanted to do, and there was a long quiet on the line, and then my brother the insurance man said, “I’ll drive Dad’s old 4440. I can be down by seven.” His voice was not steady when he said it.

I called Carl up by Toledo. Same thing. “I’m taking the day,” he said. “I’ll pull the gravity wagon behind the 4020 so folks know it’s the family.” My brothers were not farmers anymore but they knew exactly what I meant without me spelling one word of it.

Then I started calling neighbors. It was near midnight by then, and these are people who get up at five, and not one of them was short with me. Not one.