The Combine That Was Still Running

The crowd came up out of their seats all at once. I could see it before I could hear it over the engine. People standing on the bleachers. Kids on their fathers’ shoulders. A woman near the top waving a straw hat.

Then I heard it.

“Rup-pert. Rup-pert. Rup-pert.”

It started somewhere on the west end, and it went across the whole grandstand like a wave going across a pond. Hundreds of people, stamping their feet on the metal, saying my father’s name.

It was my name, too. Bo’s and Trace’s name. And it was Darrell’s name.

I looked at the front row on the east end.

Darrell was standing up.

He had taken off his sunglasses. He was not chanting. He was just standing there in the front row, with the whole town around him and behind him saying the name he was born with, and he was looking past me, across the arena, at the pits.

I followed where he was looking. Mahlon was standing up off his bucket. Dad’s crew was standing beside him at the fence, nine old men with their caps off, and Idella with her hand over her mouth.

The judge waved the checkered flag. It was over. Dad’s combine was the last one running.

And Darrell put his hand on the rail in front of the front row and climbed over it.

He dropped down into the dirt of the arena in his good shoes and his town clothes. A fair worker started toward him, then stopped. I think he saw something in Darrell’s face.

Darrell walked across the arena. Not toward me. Toward the pits.

The chanting got quieter. People could see something was happening and they wanted to see what. I shut the engine down. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the cattle barn, a calf bawling somewhere, the flag snapping on the pole over the grandstand.

Darrell walked all the way to the cattle panel fence where Mahlon was standing. He stopped in front of him. His shoes were gray with dust halfway up.

I was too far away to hear what he said at first. Later Trace told me, because Trace was standing right there.

Darrell said, “Mahlon, I told you to get down off that machine like you were a hired hand who didn’t belong on it. You had more right to that seat than I ever did. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I was wrong in front of you and I’m sorry in front of everybody.”

He said it loud enough that the front rows heard it. I know because people told me afterward.

Mahlon looked at him for a long time. Then Mahlon reached across the cattle panel and put his hand on Darrell’s shoulder, the way he used to put it on ours when we were boys and girls doing chores, to let us know the job was done and we could go in.

“Your uncle would have been glad to hear you say it,” Mahlon said. “Go on now. Your cousin’s waiting.”

Darrell turned around. And then he did come toward me.

He walked back across the arena, through the dirt, and stopped at the bottom of the combine ladder. He looked up at the machine for a while. At the fresh green paint over the dents. At Bo’s cage. At the cracked side windows.

Then he saw Dad’s cap on the seat beside me, and his face changed.

“That’s his,” Darrell said.

“That’s his,” I said.