The Combine That Was Still Running

“Head comes off first,” he said. “Then the windshield. Then the cage. Then we figure out the fuel tank, because the fair won’t pass it where it is.”

The fair has rules for the combine derby, and they are not loose. The rules sheet came from the extension office, and I still have it, folded into quarters, with coffee rings on it.

No header. No windshield. A cage welded around the cab, over the driver. The fuel tank moved inside a protected spot or replaced with a small one. Battery strapped down and covered. A fire extinguisher in reach. A helmet, a shirt with sleeves, long pants, boots, work gloves.

Trace showed up with a pickup bed full of things he had found. A smaller fuel tank from a salvage yard near Fort Dodge. A seat belt harness from a wrecked pickup. Two old truck tires to stuff in the front for bumpers. Pipe from somewhere.

“Where did you get all this,” I asked.

“People,” Trace said. “I told them what it was for. Nobody would take money.”

We took the head off that first day. It took all three of us and Bo’s shop truck with the boom. When it came free and sat on the shed floor, the combine looked strange without it, like a man without his hat.

The windshield came out next. Bo did most of it, careful, and laid it on a tarp. I swept up what broke. Trace hauled it to the dump.

Around ten o’clock, Mahlon’s pickup came up the lane.

He got out slow. He had his thermos and a five gallon bucket. He set the bucket upside down a good ten feet from the combine, sat on it, poured himself a cup of coffee, and watched.

None of us said anything at first. Then Bo said, “Morning, Mahlon.”

“Morning,” Mahlon said. He drank his coffee. Then he said, “You’re going to want to leave that unloading auger on. It’s a good handle for the cage if you brace it.”

Bo looked at the auger. He looked at Mahlon. Then he went and got his tape measure.

Mahlon came every Saturday after that. Every one, April through August. He always brought his thermos. After the second week he also brought a plate of cinnamon rolls his wife, Idella, had made, wrapped in a dish towel, still warm.

He never picked up a tool. His hands shake too much now for that, and he knows it. But he sat on his bucket and told us what we were doing wrong, and he was usually right.

“That cage is too close to her head,” he said one Saturday. Bo measured. It was an inch too close. Bo cut it out and welded it again.

“You’re going to want more steel behind that radiator,” he said another time. “These boys at the fair back into each other. They go after the back end.” Bo added a plate. It turned out to be the most important plate on the whole machine.

Some Saturdays we did not get much done. Some Saturdays we just stood around the combine and talked about Dad.

Bo told the one about Dad teaching him to weld, at fourteen, and saying the only thing a weld has to be is honest. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It has to hold.