The Combine That Was Still Running

The night before the fair, I did one more thing. I went into the house, which was empty now except for a few boxes, and found Dad’s seed cap on the hook by the back door. It was the one he always wore, sweat stained, the bill folded nearly in half.

I did not know yet what I was going to do with it. I just took it.

The derby was on the second Saturday in August, two o’clock in the afternoon, in front of the grandstand.

It was hot, the way August is hot in Iowa, with the sky that hard pale blue and not one cloud. The fairgrounds smelled like pork burgers and dust and the cattle barn. Kids ran by with cotton candy. The loudspeaker kept announcing the 4-H results between songs.

Bo and Trace and I hauled the combine in that morning on a lowboy Trace had borrowed from the co-op. The pits were behind the arena, in a dirt lot fenced with cattle panels. Eight combines. Eight trucks. Eight families, give or take.

The fair board had a man check every machine. He was an older fellow with a clipboard and a flashlight, and he climbed all over ours. He looked at the cage. He looked at the fuel tank. He shook the battery strap. He checked the fire extinguisher’s pin.

When he got down, he said, “Who did your welding?”

Bo said, “I did.”

The man nodded. “That’s an honest weld,” he said, and he signed our sheet.

Bo looked at me. I looked at Bo. Neither one of us said anything. We didn’t have to.

Around noon, people started coming into the pits who were not part of any team. Old men, mostly. Men in seed caps and short sleeve shirts with snaps, men with the farmer’s tan line on their arms and hands like boards.

They came over to our combine one at a time and looked at it. Some of them put a hand on the tire. One of them, a man I knew from church, said, “That’s Ruppert’s machine,” and his voice was rough.

By one o’clock there were six of them standing around our trailer. Then nine. They were Dad’s crew. Not one crew, exactly. They were every man who had ever ridden in the grain truck for Dad, or helped him pull a calf, or came to fill silo, over forty-some years.

Mahlon was in the middle of them, on his bucket, which he had brought from home. Idella was beside him on a lawn chair with a cooler of water bottles and a paper sack of sandwiches for anybody who wanted one.

“We’re your pit crew,” Mahlon said, like it had been decided a long time ago.

At half past one, the grandstand started filling. You could hear it from the pits, the rumble of feet on the metal bleachers, the kids hollering, the announcer testing the speaker.

Trace went out to look. He came back and said, “It’s packed. It’s packed to the top row.”

Then he said, “Darrell’s out there.”

I did not believe him. “Where?”

“Front row. East end. In the middle, right by the rail.” He paused. “Somebody must have told him.”

Bo said, “Everybody told him. This whole town knows.”

That was true. In a county like ours, a story goes around fast. By August, half the people at the fair knew that Darrell had called Dad’s combine scrap and that we had bought it back from him for eighteen hundred dollars. The other half knew by the time the gates opened.