The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

The fields

We went past the home quarter first, the field where he taught me to run the planter. I said to Ben, “This is where Grandpa Arnie taught me to plant. I was fourteen. He said my rows were straighter than his.”

“Were they?” Ben asked.

“No,” I said. “But he said so anyway.”

Ben thought about that. Then he reached into the pocket of his church pants and pulled out something folded, and unfolded it, and set it on the dash.

It was Dad’s old seed cap, the faded one with the sweat stain on the band. He must have taken it off the hook in our mudroom where Dad left it on Sundays.

“So he can see too,” Ben said.

I did not say anything. I could not. I just kept the combine straight on the gravel and let the tears go where they wanted, and Ben, bless him, pretended not to notice and looked out the window.

We went past the river eighty, the low ground that floods every spring and that Dad insisted on planting anyway, every year, because he said a field you give up on is a field you never get back.

We went past the Hanson quarter, the field where he died. The stubble was cut clean and even, all the way to the fence line, and you could still see the tire tracks where the Schroeder boys had turned their combines at the end rows.

Corn stubble on both sides of the road. Every acre he farmed, harvested and done. The neighbors had seen to that.

The farm wives

All along the road, people had come out. I had not expected that. I do not know how word spread so fast, but in farm country it always does.

A woman I did not know stood at the end of her driveway with her hand on her heart.

An old man sat in a lawn chair beside his mailbox with a blanket over his knees, and as the hearse passed, he stood up, slowly, using the mailbox to pull himself, and stayed standing until the last tractor was gone.

At the Schroeder place, their mother, Arlene, who is eighty-six, was sitting in a wheelchair at the end of the lane with a grandson holding the handles.

She lifted one hand off the blanket and held it up as Dad went by.

The hill

There is one rise on that road, about two miles from the cemetery, where the land lifts just enough to see a long way back. Up here, a hill is anything taller than a grain bin.

At the top of it, I looked in the mirror. The line ran back two miles, counting the cars.

Tractors, headlights on, one after another down the gravel, and then the pickups and cars behind them, all the way back to the curve by the Lund place.

“Can I count them?” Ben asked.

“Go ahead.”

He turned around in the buddy seat and started counting out loud. “One, two, three.” He got to nineteen before the road curved and the line bent out of sight, and then he started over and lost count again.

“It’s too many,” he said finally, and he sounded happy about it.

At the corner by Ole’s place, the hearse slowed to make the turn, and through its back window I saw Sandra twist around in the front seat and look back.

She looked for a long time. Past the casket, past the combine, past me and Ben, at the two miles of tractors coming down the road behind her husband.

Then she turned back around, and I did not see her face again until the cemetery.