The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

The notes

“Arnold James Rasmussen was born on March 9, 1954,” Pastor Greg read. “He graduated from high school in 1972 and worked in agriculture his whole life.”

Worked in agriculture. I felt Ole, standing behind me, shift his weight.

“Arnie was a devoted husband to Sandra,” Pastor Greg went on. “Together they enjoyed trips to the lake each summer, where Arnie loved to fish for walleye. He enjoyed watching the evening news, a good cup of coffee, and his garden.”

It was all true. Every word of it. It was just such a small piece of him, and it was the piece Sandra knew, and I understood that, sitting there.

She had written down the man she had. It was all she had.

“He was a man of simple pleasures,” Pastor Greg read, “who…”

And then he stopped.

He stopped in the middle of the sentence and just stood there with the paper in his hand. The wind moved the edge of the tent.

Pastor Greg looked up from the notes. He looked out past the crowd at the tractors lined along the road, thirty of them, headlights still on, all the way down into the ditch.

Then he looked at Sandra. He looked at her for what felt like a long time, and it was not unkind. It was a question.

I did not see it, but Jill told me later that Sandra looked out at the tractors too, and then down at her lap, and then she gave the smallest nod a person can give.

Pastor Greg folded the notes and put them back in his coat pocket.

“I met Arnie once,” he said into the microphone. “At the fall supper, in September. He told me the lefse was better last year, and he asked me if I had ever driven a tractor. I said no. He said, well, you’re new, there’s time.”

A few people laughed, softly. It was such an Arnie thing to say.

“That is everything I know about him firsthand,” Pastor Greg said. “Every one of you knows more than I do. I think the man who should finish this is the one who drove his combine here.”

He walked across to me and held out the microphone.

What I said

I had not written anything down. I had not let myself, because Sandra said the lunch, if there was time, and I had decided I would not take a single thing at that funeral she had not given me.

I looked at Sandra. She was looking at her hands. I stood up, and Ben stood up with me, without being asked, and stayed next to me with his shoulder against my leg.

I took the microphone. It was cold in my hand.

“My dad farmed this ground for fifty-three years,” I said. “I farmed it with him for twenty-two. I want to tell you one thing about him, and then I want to say thank you, and then I’ll sit down.”

My voice was steadier than I expected. I think it was the tractors. It is hard to come apart in front of thirty tractors.

“When I was fourteen, he taught me to run the planter on the home quarter,” I said. “He didn’t say one word until I finished the first round. Then he said, ‘Straighter than mine.’ It wasn’t. Nothing was straighter than his. But that’s who he was. He gave you more credit than you’d earned, and then he waited for you to catch up to it.”

I saw Ole nod, behind the crowd. One of the Schroeder boys wiped his face with his whole hand, the way men do.

“He planted the river eighty every year, even when it flooded,” I said. “He said a field you give up on is a field you never get back. I think he felt that way about people too.”