The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

The steps

When the service was over, the pallbearers carried Dad out. I was one of them, with Ole and the three Schroeder boys and my cousin Kevin from Fargo.

We came down the church steps with the casket and turned toward the hearse, and that is when Sandra saw the combine.

It was parked at the curb right behind the hearse, where Jeff from the funeral home had let me put it that morning.

Green and clean, header off, door shut, with Dad’s notebook still on the dash.

Sandra stopped on the steps. The people behind her stopped too. For a moment the whole line of mourners just stood there, backed up to the church door, while Sandra looked at that combine.

Then she looked at me, standing at the back of the hearse with my hand on Dad’s casket, and I could not read her face at all.

We slid the casket into the hearse. Jeff closed the back door.

Jeff opened the front passenger door, because Sandra had asked to ride up front with him. She walked down the steps and got in without a word to anyone.

The engines

I walked back to the combine. Ben was already waiting by the steps, and I boosted him up the ladder, and he scrambled into the buddy seat beside the operator’s chair like he had done it a hundred times, which he had.

I climbed up after him in my dark suit and tie. I sat down in Dad’s seat. It was still adjusted for him, a notch farther back than I keep mine, and I left it there.

I started the engine and left the door open. I wanted to hear the town, and the church bell, and whatever came next.

That is when I heard the other engines.

They came from every direction at once. From the side street by the hardware store, from the alley behind the café, from the lot behind the elevator where somebody must have staged them. Tractors, one after another, pulling in behind the combine.

Different colors, every make a farmer ever argued about. Old ones and new ones.

Ole was in the first one, right behind me, in his good suit, sitting very straight. The Schroeder boys were behind him, all three, one tractor each.

Then men Dad had traded work with, sold seed to, bought cattle from, sat beside at the elevator every morning for forty years.

Ben was turned all the way around in his seat with his nose against the back glass. “Dad,” he said. “Dad. There’s so many.”

There were thirty. I counted them later. Thirty tractors from farms in four townships, on a Friday afternoon in the last week of harvest, when every one of those men had corn of his own still standing.

The gravel

The sheriff’s deputy pulled out first with his lights going, then the hearse, then Dad’s combine, then the thirty tractors, and behind them the cars. Jill drove with the girls, and behind her, everybody else.

We went down Main Street at about ten miles an hour. People came out of the stores and stood on the sidewalk.

At the edge of town, we passed the elevator, where Dad had hauled every bushel he ever grew, and the men working there had shut down the leg and were standing in a row by the scale house with their caps over their hearts.

Then we turned off the highway onto the gravel, and the wet gravel spat mud behind the hearse, and I settled in at fifteen miles an hour with the combine rocking gently in the ruts, and Dad took his last ride past his ground.