The Combine That Was Still Running

I went out to Mahlon’s pickup and knocked on the window. He rolled it down halfway. His eyes were wet, and he looked straight ahead out the windshield at the shed.

“Your dad bought that machine new in 1979, the year your mother let him quit patching the old one,” he said. “We put every harvest on it since. He did the last rounds of oats in it in July. It runs, Halle. It runs good.”

“I know it does,” I said.

“Darrell knows it too,” he said. “He just doesn’t care.” Then he rolled the window back up, gently, like he did not want me to think he was mad at me, and he drove home.

I stood in the yard a long time after that. A pair of geese went over, low, headed for the creek. I could hear Darrell inside the shed on the phone, telling somebody the planter would bring more than he thought.

That night I called my brothers.

Bo is the oldest of us. He is 40, he runs a welding and repair shop at the edge of town, and he talks about as much as a fence post. He picked up on the second ring and said, “Yeah.”

Trace is the youngest. He is 33, he drives truck for the co-op, and he knows every salvage yard and every farm sale in three counties. He picked up on the fifth ring, out of breath, and said, “What happened.”

I told them. All of it. Darrell kicking the tire. The man from Webster County. Mahlon climbing down off the step.

There was a long quiet on the line. Then Bo said, “Can he do that?”

“He can do it,” I said. “He’s the executor. It’s his to sell. The will says he settles everything, and the bank gets paid first. We can’t stop him and we’re not going to fight him over it.”

That is the plain truth, and I want to say it plain, because people always ask. We did not call a lawyer because there was nothing a lawyer could do. Darrell was not breaking any rule. He was doing his job.

“Then we buy it,” Trace said.

Bo said, “For eighteen hundred dollars.”

“For eighteen hundred dollars,” Trace said. “Six hundred apiece. The bank gets the same money either way. Darrell gets his number. Nobody loses anything.”

“And then what,” Bo said. “We’ve got a 1979 combine with no ground to run it on. You going to cut beans in your front yard?”

Trace laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh since the funeral home. “No,” he said. “We’re going to run it in the derby.”

I did not understand him at first. Then I did.

Every August, our county fair runs a combine demolition derby on the Saturday afternoon in front of the grandstand. Old combines, heads off, windshields out, cages welded on, beating each other to pieces in the dirt until only one is still moving.

Dad loved it. He never ran in it himself. He said a man who had paid for a combine could never bring himself to hit anything with it on purpose. But he went every year, and he sat in the same spot, third row up on the east end, and he cheered like a boy.

“Dad would never,” Bo said.

“Dad would never sell it for scrap, either,” Trace said. “At least this way it goes out running.”

There was another long quiet. I could hear Bo’s television in the background, a ball game, and his wife telling the kids to get ready for bed.