The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

The country church

The cemetery is out in the country, behind a little white church that has been closed since 1992.

Dad was baptized in that church, and so was I. Most of the old families out here still have their plots behind it.

When it came up over the horizon, Ben pointed at it. “Is that where Grandpa Arnie’s going?”

“That’s where,” I said.

“Is Grandma Joan there?”

“She is. Right next to where he’s going to be.”

Ben nodded. He sat back in his seat and put his hand on Dad’s seed cap on the dash and kept it there the rest of the way.

The grave

The deputy pulled off at the church lot, and Jeff drove the hearse right up the little cemetery lane to the grave.

I parked the combine at the edge of the road, and the tractors lined up behind me along the shoulder, one after another, until they ran out of shoulder and started parking in the ditch.

The men got down from their tractors and walked over in their suits and their good coats. Nobody said much.

We carried Dad from the hearse to the grave, and set him on the straps, and stepped back.

Jeff had set up a little portable speaker on a stand by the grave, with a cordless microphone, because there were so many people.

They stood in rows all the way back to the cemetery fence and out into the road.

Sandra sat in a folding chair at the front, under the funeral home tent, with her purse in her lap.

Jill and the kids and I sat beside her. Ben sat right next to me with his shoulder pressed against my arm.

Pastor Greg read the committal. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He did it plainly and well.

Then he took a folded sheet of paper out of his coat pocket and unfolded it, and I knew it was Sandra’s notes.