The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

Wendell held the microphone out to my brother-in-law like he was handing him a plate at a potluck. It was Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, and the sun sat hot on the show grounds.

“And this next one,” Wendell said into the speaker, “is a 1928 wooden separator, brought to us by the Neff family. Grady, you want to tell folks about her?”

Grady Neff took the microphone. He is 58, broad through the shoulders, and he had on a new seed cap he had bought that morning at the swap meet. He looked out at the crowd and grinned.

The machine sat behind him on the grass, red and yellow, bright in the sun, every board of it Dad’s work. The oak sides were tight and straight. The pulleys were trued. The stacker pipe pointed off toward the oats stubble like a long arm.

“Well,” Grady said, “she was a wreck when I found her. Rotted plumb through. Took me four winters in the shop. Rebuilt every inch of her myself.”

People clapped. A man near the front whistled. Somebody’s grandson asked his mother if that man built the whole thing, and she said it sure sounded like it.

I was standing at the rope about twenty feet from my dad. Arlis Bontrager is 85 years old. He had on his straw hat and his blue denim shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist, the way he wears it in any heat.

He did not move. He did not look at me. He looked at the machine, and then he looked down at his own two hands, and then he looked at the ground.

I took one step toward the microphone. I did not know what I was going to say. I only knew my feet were going.

My sister Rhoda had my arm before I took the second step. Her fingers dug in hard, right above the elbow.

“Fern,” she said, low. “Please. Please don’t shame him in front of the whole show.”

I looked at her. Rhoda is 55, and she has been married to Grady for thirty years. Her eyes were wet. She was not asking for Grady. She was asking for herself, because she was the one who would ride home with him in that truck.

So I stood there. I let Wendell take the microphone back. I let the crowd move on to the next machine, a little hit and miss engine that went pop, pop, pop, pop.

And I watched my father turn around and walk, slow, back toward the shade by the grandstand, his hand on the rope the whole way like it was a railing.

The Fence Row

I need to tell you about that machine, so you understand what was taken.

Four falls ago, Dad was helping a neighbor clear an old fence row on the other side of the section. Cedar trees, multiflora rose, a rusted disc, the usual. Back in the brush, with a hackberry tree grown right up through the middle of it, sat the threshing machine.

It had been there since the war, the neighbor figured. His granddad had pulled it off the last job and left it, and nobody ever came back for it. The wood had gone gray and then black and then soft.

Dad called me that night. I remember because he almost never calls. He waits for me to call him.

“Fernie,” he said, “I found a separator. Wood frame. I think it’s the same kind your grandpa ran.”

“Dad,” I said, “you are 81 years old.”

“I know how old I am,” he said. “I’m asking can you come Saturday and help me chain it.”

I came Saturday. So did Lorenz Kinsinger, who was 86 then and still drove himself everywhere in a pickup older than me. We cut the hackberry off at the ground with Dad’s chainsaw and dragged the whole thing out of the brush with his Farmall H.

It came apart a little on the way. A side board fell off. A sieve slid out and landed in the weeds, full of mouse nests and old oat hulls.

Lorenz stood there with his hands on his hips and looked at it a long time.

“Arlis,” he said, “that ain’t a machine. That’s a pattern.”

Dad smiled. “Then I’ll build from the pattern.”