The Combine That Was Still Running

Mahlon told one I had never heard. In 1981, during a wet fall, the combine got stuck to the axles in the bottom ground. Dad and Mahlon spent all of one Sunday afternoon digging it out by hand, because Dad would not ask a neighbor to pull it on a Sunday.

“Your mother brought us dinner in the field,” Mahlon said. “Fried chicken in a roaster. We sat on the tire and ate it. Your dad said grace with mud up to his elbows.” He smiled down at his coffee. “Best meal I ever had.”

That is the kind of thing nobody writes on an estate tag.

In June, Trace came in carrying a paint can.

It was a gallon can of John Deere green, half full, with a dried drip down the side and Dad’s thumbprint in the drip. He had found it on the back shelf of the shop, behind a box of fence staples, right where Dad had left it.

“It’s his,” Trace said. “It’s the green he used on the grain tank.” He set it on the shed floor in front of us like it was something in church.

We bought three more gallons of the same green at the implement dealer in town. But we opened Dad’s can first. Bo stirred it with a paint stick for a long time. Then I took the brush and painted the first stroke on the side of the grain tank, right over the bare metal Dad had sanded and never finished.

It went on smooth. It matched. Of course it matched.

Mahlon got up off his bucket, walked over, and looked at it close. Then he put his hand flat on the side of the tank, beside the wet paint, and left it there for a while. Nobody said anything. Bo looked at the floor. Trace went outside.

Then Mahlon said, “That’s it. That’s the color,” and went back to his bucket.

We painted the whole machine over two weekends. It was not a show job. Bo said it did not have to be pretty, it just had to be honest. By the end of June it was green from top to bottom, and you could hardly tell it was forty-some years old.

Darrell drove by once, in July. I saw his car slow down at the end of the lane, and I saw him look up toward the shed, where the big door was open and the combine was sitting in the light, fresh green, with Bo’s cage welded around the cab.

He did not turn in. He sped up and went on.

In July we started it for the first time since spring. Mahlon said to give it time to warm, and we did. It coughed twice, black smoke rolled out the top, and then it caught and ran, steady and loud. Bo stood back with his arms crossed and nodded.

I climbed up the ladder and into the cab. There was no windshield. The wind came straight through. I sat in Dad’s seat, buckled into the harness from Trace’s wrecked pickup, with Bo’s cage all around me, and I put my hands on the wheel.

Then I drove it out of the shed, into the yard, and around the grove once, slow, the way Dad used to drive it out in the fall to check it over before harvest.

When I came back around, Mahlon was standing up off his bucket, and he had his cap off and was holding it over his chest.