The Combine That Was Still Running

My cousin Darrell kicked the front tire of my father’s combine like he was checking a used car he had already decided not to buy. The sound rang off the tin walls of the machine shed.

“It’s scrap, Halle,” he said. “I don’t know how many ways to say it. It’s a 1979. It’s worth more as iron than it is as a combine.”

It was a gray Saturday in March, the kind of north-central Iowa morning where the frost is still in the low spots and the mud is already in the yard. Dad had been gone since January.

The combine sat where it always sat, along the north wall of the shed, nose toward the big door. A John Deere, green and faded, with a patch of bare metal on the grain tank where Dad had sanded rust and never finished.

On the cab step sat Mahlon. He had worked for my dad for forty-six years. He was 79 now, and he had driven out from town that morning because he had heard a man was coming to look at the machines.

He had a thermos of coffee between his boots. He was not drinking it. He was just holding it, the way you hold something when you need your hands busy.

“The man from Webster County will be here Saturday with a lowboy,” Darrell said. “Eighteen hundred, cash, and he hauls it himself. That’s a fair number. That’s more than fair.”

Then he looked at Mahlon. “You can get down off there now. It’s sold.”

Mahlon looked up at him. For one second I thought he would say something. Mahlon has a voice that can stop a stubborn cow at forty yards. But he just nodded, and he stood up slow, and he climbed down one rung at a time.

He kept one hand on the rail all the way down, the way Dad used to tell us to. Three points of contact. Then he picked up his thermos and walked out to his pickup and sat in it with the door closed.

I should tell you who Darrell is, because it would be easy to make him sound like a stranger. He is not a stranger. He is my dad’s brother’s oldest boy, forty-five years old, and he grew up two miles down the same gravel road.

He did Dad’s taxes for nineteen years. He works in an accounting office in town. When Dad made out his will, he named Darrell to settle the estate, because Darrell was the one in the family who was good with paper. None of us argued. Darrell was good with paper.

And I want to be fair to him, the way Dad would want me to be fair. The estate was not a rich estate. Dad had an operating note at the bank from two bad years in a row, and the bank wanted it settled by the first of July.

Every dollar from every machine on that place was going to the bank. Not to us. Not to Bo, not to Trace, not to me. The land was already rented out to a neighbor, and the house had been empty since Mom passed six years ago.

So when Darrell said he had to move fast, he was telling the truth. When he said the combine was worth more as iron, he was probably telling the truth too.

What he did not have to do was talk to Mahlon like that.