The Combine That Was Still Running

Darrell took hold of the ladder rail. He put his good town shoe on the bottom rung. Three points of contact, the way Dad taught all of us, every kid in the family. And he climbed up the ladder, one rung at a time, and held out his hand to me through the open cab door.

I took off my glove and shook it.

His hand was shaking. So was mine.

“I said it was scrap,” he said. “I said it in front of you and I said it in front of Mahlon. I’m the one who was scrap that day, Halle. I’m sorry.”

“I know you had the bank on you,” I said.

“I did,” he said. “That’s not why I said it like that. I said it like that because I didn’t want to stand in his shed and feel anything.” He looked at the cap again. “I couldn’t afford to feel anything and get it done on time. So I didn’t.”

I did not have anything wise to say to that. So I just held on to his hand a little longer.

The grandstand had gone quiet. Then somebody up near the top started clapping, slow, and the rest of them picked it up, and it was not a chant this time. Just clapping. For Dad, I think. And maybe a little for Darrell, for climbing up there in his good shoes in front of the whole county.

They gave us a trophy. It was a small one, gold plastic, a combine on a wood base. They also gave us the winner’s check, which was five hundred dollars.

We had talked about it in the truck on the way in, all three of us, just in case. We gave the check to the 4-H club, for the livestock barn fans, because the barn is always too hot in August and Dad complained about it every single year.

That night we hauled the combine home on the borrowed lowboy, slow, with the flashers going, and had it home before supper. We put it back in the shed, along the north wall, nose toward the big door. Right where it had always been.

The farm is not ours anymore, not really. The land is rented and the house is going to be sold in the spring. But Bo bought the shed and a half acre around it from the estate, before Darrell closed it out, for a fair price. Darrell wrote the papers himself, and he did it right.

The combine lives there. Mahlon still comes out some Saturdays. He brings his thermos. He sits on his bucket in the open door and looks at it. Sometimes Idella sends rolls.

Darrell came out once in September. He brought his two boys, who are nine and eleven. He let them climb up the ladder, one at a time, three points of contact, and sit in the seat behind Bo’s cage, and turn the wheel back and forth.

“That was your great uncle’s,” he told them. “He farmed with it for forty years. Then your cousin Halle drove it in the fair and it was the last one running.”

The younger boy asked if it was going to be scrap someday.

Darrell looked at the combine, and then at me, and then at Mahlon on his bucket in the doorway.

“No,” he said. “Not this one.”

Dad’s cap is on the hook inside the shed door now. Bo put a nail there for it. On the way out, every time, I touch the bill.

Dad always said a weld does not have to be pretty. It just has to be honest, and it has to hold.

So did we.