The Combine That Was Still Running

“I’ll weld the cage,” Bo finally said. “But Halle drives it. She’s the only one of us Dad ever let take it in the field.”

That was true. When I was twelve, Dad put me in the seat during oat harvest and stood on the platform beside me with one hand on the back of the chair. I ran the last three rounds of the north field that year while he talked me through every turn.

I have been in seed sales for eleven years now. I spend my days in a company pickup, talking to farmers at their kitchen tables about yield and disease packages and price per bag. But some part of me never got out of that seat.

“I’ll drive it,” I said.

On Friday I drove out to the farm on my lunch hour. Darrell was in the shed with a clipboard, putting tags on everything. Dad’s welder. Dad’s chain saw. A box of Dad’s wrenches with Dad’s initials scratched into the handles.

I handed him an envelope. It was one of the big white envelopes from the seed company, with our logo in the corner, because that was what I had in the truck. Inside was eighteen hundred dollars in cash. Six hundred from each of us.

Darrell opened it and counted it. Then he counted it again.

“What is this,” he said.

“It’s your number,” I said. “We’re buying the combine. The bank gets the same eighteen hundred. You can call the man from Webster County and tell him not to come.”

He looked at me over the top of the envelope. “Halle. What on earth are you going to do with a combine?”

“Something Dad would have liked,” I said.

He shook his head. “You three are throwing money in the creek. You know that, right? That thing will sit here and rust until somebody finally hauls it off for less than this.”

“Then it’ll be our money in the creek,” I said.

He wrote me a receipt on a page from his clipboard and signed it. Then he took out his phone and called the man from Webster County while I stood there, and told him the combine was no longer available, and apologized for the trouble.

When he hung up, I said, “Darrell, you owe Mahlon an apology.”

He actually looked confused. “For what?”

“For telling him to get down off that combine like he was a kid on a fence.”

Darrell put his phone in his pocket. “Halle, I’ve got a bank breathing down my neck and an estate to close and three of you calling me every other day. I don’t have time to manage everybody’s feelings about a machine.”

“He’s not everybody,” I said. “He’s Mahlon.”

Darrell did not answer that. He went back to his clipboard. I went back to my truck and sat in it for a minute, the way Mahlon had, and then I drove back to work.

The bank was paid off in June. Darrell got it done two weeks early. I will give him that. Everything Dad owned went down the road on trailers, one machine at a time, and the shed got emptier every week.

Except for the combine. It sat along the north wall, nose to the big door, waiting.

Bo started on it the first Saturday in April.

He backed his shop truck into the shed and unloaded his welder and his torch and a stack of pipe. He did not say much. He walked around the combine three times with his hands in his pockets, looking at it the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.