The Combine I Drove for Dad

The Lane to the Cemetery

The Zion cemetery sits on a little rise, about the only rise for miles, with a gravel lane running up into it off the county road and a row of maples along the fence that were dropping their leaves that day, red and gold all over the gravel.

I turned the combine up the lane slow and eased it off onto the grass to the side so the hearse could get to the tent they had set up over the grave. And then I shut her down and climbed out and stood there, and I watched the tractors come.

They turned up that lane one after another, thirty of them, and there was no room for thirty tractors inside a country cemetery, so they just lined up all the way back down the county road, flashers blinking in the gray, and the men shut them off and climbed down and walked up the lane on foot with their caps in their hands.

Pastor Rennick was already up at the tent in his good gray suit, waiting by the casket with his little book, ready to say the committal, the part at the graveside. Paulette was being helped to the front-row chairs under the tent.

Rennick opened his book and he started in. “We are gathered to commit the body of our brother Harry Mentzer.” And he looked up and he saw them. He saw the farmers coming up that lane, dozens of them, filling in all around the tent and spilling back among the headstones, standing shoulder to shoulder with their caps off in the cold, more people than that little cemetery had held in years.

And the radio preacher, to his credit, stopped.

He stood there a second with his book open, and I watched him understand, the same late understanding I had seen on Paulette’s face on the church steps. He understood that he did not know these people and these people did not know him, and that whatever he had on his typed page was not equal to what had just walked up that lane.

He closed his book. He looked around, and his eyes found me where I stood by the combine, and he said it out loud, in front of everybody.

“I only met Harold once,” he said. “I think the man who ought to speak over him is one who knew him.” And he held the microphone out across the grave, toward me.