The Combine at My Father’s Funeral

The thank you

I turned toward Sandra then. I had not planned to. But she was sitting there alone in that folding chair with her purse in her lap, in the middle of four townships of people she had never once had coffee with in the right room.

“My mother is buried twenty feet from here,” I said. “Dad loved her for thirty-six years. When she died, he stopped laughing. He ate supper standing up at the counter for three years.”

Sandra’s hands went still on her purse.

“Then he met Sandra,” I said. “And she made him go to the doctor. She found his blood pressure. She made him take the pills and quit salting his eggs. She took him to the lake, which he’d never done in his life, and he came home talking about walleye.”

I looked right at her.

“I heard him laugh in the yard one night, the first summer they were married, and I stopped what I was doing, because I hadn’t heard it in three years,” I said. “Sandra gave him that. She gave him eight more years and a laugh. I never thanked her for it. I’m doing it now. Thank you, Sandra.”

Sandra put her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders shook once. She did not make a sound, but she bent forward in the chair, and Jill moved over and put an arm around her.

“And thank you, all of you, for bringing your tractors,” I said. “He’d have hated the fuss. He’d have loved that you did it anyway.”

I handed the microphone back to Pastor Greg and sat down. Ben climbed into my lap, ten years old and too big for it, and I let him.

After

Pastor Greg said the benediction. Then Jeff’s men lowered Dad down beside Mom, and the people came past one at a time and dropped a handful of dirt, and then it was over.

The men walked back to their tractors. One by one, the engines started, and they pulled out of the ditch and headed home to their own corn. Not one of them left without walking past the grave first.

Ole was the last to go. He shook my hand, once, hard. “Good job, Dale,” he said. That was all. From Ole, that is a speech.

I drove the combine home with Ben beside me, the short way, down the highway at twenty miles an hour, with the hazard lights going and Dad’s cap still on the dash. Neither of us said anything for the first five miles.

Then Ben said, “Dad? When I’m big, will you let me drive the combine?”

“When you’re fourteen,” I said, “I’ll teach you to run the planter on the home quarter. And I won’t say one word until you get to the end of the first round.”

He thought about it. “And then what will you say?”

“I’ll think of something,” I said.

The lunch

The lunch was in the church basement in town at four o’clock. The women of the church had been cooking since morning.

I expected Sandra to sit alone. She had sat alone at every church lunch I had ever seen her at.

But when I came down the basement stairs, she was at the end of the long table, and the women of the church were around her.

Mike Schroeder’s wife brought her a plate. The woman who runs the café sat down across from her and talked about Dad’s coffee order.

Ole Berg’s wife, Karen, who had never said more than hello to Sandra in eight years, sat right beside her and held her hand on the table.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched that. The whole county had seen the procession, and now the whole county was coming to sit with Sandra.

I do not think she had ever had that before. Not here. Not once.