The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

Sandra had the funeral home folder open on her kitchen table, and most of the lines were already filled in with her neat bank-teller handwriting before Jill and I even sat down.

“Pastor Greg will give the eulogy,” she said, sliding a cup of coffee toward me. “I spoke with him this morning. I’ve written him a check for four hundred dollars, so that part is settled.”

I looked at the check register lying open beside the folder. Four hundred dollars, made out to a man who had been in town since April and had met my father exactly one time, at the fall supper in the church basement.

“I’d like to say something about Dad,” I said. “At the service. It doesn’t have to be long. Five minutes, maybe less. I just want to say who he was.”

Sandra closed the folder. She did it gently, the way she used to close her cash drawer at the bank when the line was done for the day. “You can say a few words at the lunch, Dale. If there’s time.”

If there’s time. I sat there with my seed cap in my lap, and those three words went down into my chest and sat there like a stone I had swallowed by mistake.

Jill put her hand on my knee under the table and left it there.

We have been married nineteen years, and she knows when I am about to say something I will not be able to take back.

I did not say it. I said, “All right,” and I drank the coffee, and Sandra wrote something on the folder that I could not read upside down.

That was Monday afternoon. My father had been dead for two days.

The grain cart

It happened on a Saturday, the twenty-fourth day of a harvest that had gone well until it didn’t.

We had the beans off by the first week of October, and we were down to the last quarter of corn.

I was running the combine on the Hanson quarter, the one Dad bought in 1987 with money he did not have, and Dad was pulling the grain cart with the big tractor. It was the job he liked best by then.

He used to say the cart was the only job on the farm where nobody could find you.

He would ride alongside me, catch the grain on the go, then haul it to the semi at the field approach and sit there with his thermos.

I unloaded on the go about two in the afternoon. He pulled away with the cart heaped, and I watched him in the mirror the way I had watched him a thousand times, heading for the approach at his usual slow, careful speed.

Halfway there, the tractor stopped. It did not turn. It just rolled to a stop in the stubble with the engine still running, and the cart stopped behind it, and nothing else happened.

I knew. I think I knew before I had the combine stopped.

I left the header running and jumped down and ran two hundred yards across the stubble in my work boots, and I have never run like that before or since.

He was slumped over against the right side of the cab, with his cap knocked off and his thermos rolled down by the clutch.

I got the door open and got him down onto the ground somehow. I do not remember how.

I called 911 with one hand and kept pushing with the other. The ambulance came out from town in twenty-two minutes, which is fast for out here.

It did not matter. The doctor said later it was a massive heart attack and that he was likely gone before the tractor finished rolling.

He was seventy-two years old. He had farmed that ground since he was nineteen.

He died with a half-full grain cart behind him, in the middle of the corn, in the last week of harvest, and if you had asked him how he wanted to go, I think that is the answer he would have given you.