The Buddy Seat I Gave My Granddaughter

My Own Machine

I walked Ava across the yard to where my combine sat waiting at the end of the lane. The corn head was out front with its long green points like fingers. The whole thing stood taller than the machine shed roof.

“That one’s yours?” Ava said, and some of the careful went out of her voice.

“That one’s mine,” I said. “Dale and I bought it the year your mama was in high school. You climb up on the left side there, where the yellow is. Three rungs. Hold the rail with both hands and do not look down, because down is boring.”

She went up that ladder like a squirrel. I came up behind her, slower.

These knees are sixty-three years old and they let me know it. I opened the cab door and the good smell of it came out, warm plastic and diesel and dust.

There are two seats in the cab of a combine. The big one on the right is the operator’s seat, where you sit at the controls.

The other one is tucked to the left and a little behind. That is the buddy seat. It has its own belt.

It is built right into the machine by the people who made it, for exactly one reason. That reason is so a person can sit beside you and learn.

Dale taught our Kim to run corn in that very seat. She was no bigger than Ava is now, pigtails and all, calling him the numbers off an older screen than mine.

Somewhere along the way we all forgot that. I had not forgotten. I had only let it get quiet, the way you let things get quiet when you are busy burying a husband.

“Sit there,” I said, and I pointed to the buddy seat.

I buckled the belt across her lap and gave it a tug, the way Kim used to tug the car seat strap when Ava was a baby.

“Now these,” I said. I settled her ear muffs down over her head, and then my own, and the roar of the world went soft and padded.

Ava’s feet did not reach the floor. She sat up as straight as a fence post, her hands flat on her knees.

She looked out through that big curved glass at eighty acres of standing corn like it was the ocean.

I lowered myself into the operator’s seat. I felt that old settle in my chest I get every fall, the one that says this is the thing you were made to do.

Out the window I could see Troy’s combine already crawling into the home field half a mile off. A plume of chaff rose gold behind it. The grain cart kept pace alongside.

“Grandma,” Ava said, and I turned my muff toward her. “Am I allowed?”

“This is my machine,” I said. “In my machine, you are allowed.”