The Combine I Drove for Dad

Header Folded

Thursday came up gray and bright the way October does in Ohio, that flat silver light with no sun in it but no rain either, the best kind of day to be on the road.

The service was at ten at Zion Church, a white frame country church with a steeple you can see from two miles off across the bean stubble. I did not go inside. I want to be straight about that too. I let Paulette have the church and the stranger preacher. I sat up in the combine cab in the gravel lot across the road with the flashers going, and my brothers were lined up behind me, Ray in Dad’s old 4440 and Carl on the 4020 with the gravity wagon, and behind them the lot and the road shoulder were filling up with tractors.

They came from everywhere. Green ones and red ones and a couple of old gray Fergusons and Denny Fox’s Oliver and a brand-new Case that one of the young Brinkman boys drove. They came down the state route with their flashers on in a long line and they pulled in and shut down and the men climbed off and stood by their machines with their caps in their hands, waiting.

I counted them while the service went on inside. I got to thirty tractors and quit counting. Thirty tractors and more pickups than that, strung back along both shoulders of the road, men and women standing quiet in the gray light.

Through the church windows I could hear the organ, and I could hear, faint, the voice of Pastor Rennick saying his piece about Harry who grew corn and loved the Lord. I sat up in my dad’s seat and I let him have his say. It cost me nothing by then.

When the doors opened and they wheeled the casket out to the hearse, Paulette came out behind it on Ray’s arm, because Ray had slipped inside at the end to walk her out, and that was a decent thing my brother did that I would not have thought to do. She stopped on the church steps.

She saw the combine. She saw the thirty tractors. She saw the whole county standing in the road with their hats off.

I watched her face from up in the cab. I thought she might come across the road and tell me to shut it down and get out of the way of the hearse. She had every right to try. It was her husband in that box.

She did not. She stood on those steps a long moment, and whatever was on her face, it was not anger. She looked like a woman who had just understood something late. Then she let Ray walk her to the car.

The funeral director came across the gravel to me, a young fellow named Kyle who I went to school with, and he looked up at the cab and he said, “Doug, you want to lead out, I’ll bring the hearse in behind you.” Not a word about whether I was allowed. He just set it up.

I put her in gear. The combine rolled out onto the two-lane with the header folded high, slow, maybe twelve miles an hour, flashers going, and the hearse eased in behind me, and behind the hearse my brothers, and behind my brothers thirty tractors fired up one after another all down that road, a sound like the whole county clearing its throat.