The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

If there’s time

On the drive home from Sandra’s, Jill did not say anything for the first two miles. Then she said, “You could fight her on it, you know. People would back you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Half the county would back you.”

“I know that too.” I looked out at the Hanson quarter going by, half of it still standing, and the tractor and the grain cart still parked where they had stopped, because I had not been able to make myself go get them.

“She’s his widow,” I said finally. “It’s her funeral to plan. I’m not going to stand at the funeral home and argue with her over Dad’s casket. I’m not going to have that be the last thing anybody remembers about his funeral.”

That night after the kids were in bed, I went out to the machine shed and sat in Dad’s combine in the dark.

I do not know why. It smelled like chaff and diesel and the coffee he always spilled on the floor mat.

There was a little spiral notebook on the dash where he wrote his yields, field by field, in pencil.

The last entry was the Hanson quarter. He had written the date and then nothing, because he never got to the number.

I sat there a long time. I thought about Pastor Greg standing up at the grave with notes Sandra had written, telling a crowd of farmers who my father was. I thought about the words “if there’s time.”

And then I thought about something Dad said to me once, years ago, when old Mr. Lund died and his family had the hearse go straight down the highway to the cemetery. Dad watched it go by from the field approach and shook his head.

“They should have taken him past his ground,” he said. “A man farms his whole life, he ought to get to see it one more time.”

The long way

The next morning I called Jeff at the funeral home. Jeff has buried half the county, and his father buried the other half.

I asked him if the hearse could take the gravel roads out to the country cemetery instead of the highway.

“How far out of the way?” he asked.

“Eleven miles instead of four,” I said. “Past every field Dad farmed.”

I called Sandra. I told her what Dad had said about Mr. Lund.

I asked if the hearse could go the long way, past the fields. I braced myself for an argument, but she sounded tired more than anything.

“Whatever road you want, Dale,” she said. “I don’t know one road from another out there.”

So that was settled. And then, before I lost my nerve, I called Ole Berg.

Ole

Ole Berg is seventy years old and has farmed the section north of ours his whole life. He and Dad traded work for over forty years.

When Dad broke his leg in 1994, Ole put in our whole crop and his own, and he never sent a bill.

I told Ole about the eulogy, and the four hundred dollars, and the lunch if there’s time.

I told him about the long way past the fields. And I told him what I had been thinking in the dark in that combine cab.

“I want to drive Dad’s combine behind the hearse,” I said. “The whole way. Is that crazy?”

“It’s not crazy,” he said. “Leave it with me.”

“Leave what with you?”

“Just leave it with me, Dale,” he said, and he hung up.