The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

Twenty-two years

I came home to farm with Dad when I was twenty-two, after two years at the tech college in Thief River Falls.

He never asked me to come home. He just kept a seat open in the shop for me, and one day I sat in it.

We farmed eleven hundred acres together, corn and soybeans and some wheat when the price was right.

He taught me to run the planter on the home quarter when I was fourteen. He stood at the end of the field with his arms crossed and did not say one word until I got to the end of the first round, and then he said, “Straighter than mine.”

It was not straighter than his. Nothing was ever straighter than his. But I have kept that sentence in my pocket for thirty years.

My mother, Joan, died of cancer eleven years ago. She was the one who kept the books and drove the meals to the field and knew the birthday of every kid in the congregation. When she died, the house went quiet, and so did Dad.

He was alone three years. He ate supper standing at the counter. He stopped going to church except for Christmas and Easter.

Then one day he went to the bank in town to talk about an operating loan, and he came home and told me the woman at the window had laughed at one of his jokes. That was Sandra.

Sandra

Sandra had worked at the bank in town for thirty-one years. She was widowed young and never had children.

They married eight years ago at the courthouse, with Jill and me as the witnesses. Dad was sixty-four.

I will be honest. I did not warm up to her quickly. She moved Mom’s furniture around inside of a month. She put Mom’s recipe box in a closet. She called the barn “the shed” and the tractor “the machine,” and when the neighbors stopped by, she offered them coffee in the front room instead of the kitchen.

Out here, people talk in the kitchen. She did not know that, and nobody told her, and so for eight years the neighbors had coffee with her in the wrong room and left early.

But I will say this, because it is true, and I did not say it out loud for eight years.

Sandra made Dad go to the doctor. She found his high blood pressure. She made him take the pills. She got him to quit salting his eggs.

She took him to the lake for a week every July, which he had never done in his life, and he came back tanned and talking about walleye.

He laughed again. I heard him laugh in the yard one evening, and I stopped what I was doing, because I had not heard that sound in three years.

So that was who sat across the table from me: a sixty-one-year-old woman from town who had lost her husband in a corn field she had never once walked into.