The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

The Drive Home

I drove Dad home that evening. He had ridden out with me that morning and planned to stay through the parade, but after the review he said he was tired.

We went down the blacktop and then the gravel, the sun going low and orange behind us, the dust hanging over the road. Dad sat with his straw hat in his lap.

For a long time he said nothing. Then, about a mile from his lane, he said one thing.

“Let him have it, Fernie. It’s only a machine.”

I looked over at him. His hands were on his knees, and they were shaking. Not much. Just enough that I could see it in the way the hat brim moved.

My father poured babbitt bearings at 82 with a hand as steady as a surveyor. His hands do not shake.

“It isn’t only a machine,” I said.

“It’s done,” he said. “That’s what matters. It’s done and it’s at the show.”

I pulled into his yard. He got out and stood by the truck a minute.

“You go on home,” he said. “I’m fine.”

He was not fine. But he is my father, and he is 85, and I have learned that you do not argue with him in his own yard.

The Phone Call

Rhoda called me at nine that night.

“I know you’re mad,” she said.

“I’m not mad at you.”

“You’re mad at Grady.”

I did not answer that.

“Fern,” she said, “he knows. He knew the minute he said it. He was quiet the whole way home. He went straight out to the garage and he hasn’t come in.”

“Good,” I said, and then I was sorry I said it.

Rhoda was quiet a second. “I’m asking you again. Please don’t make a scene. Not in front of all those people. Not in front of Dad. He couldn’t stand it, and neither could I.”

I sat on my back step in the dark with the phone to my ear and the crickets going in the beans.

“I won’t say one word to him,” I said. “I promise you that.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she sounded like she might cry.

I meant it. I was not going to say one word to Grady.

But I had been lying awake about it already, and I had thought of something. A man can say whatever he wants into a microphone. There is only one way to prove who built a threshing machine.

You run it.

Six in the Morning

I set my alarm for five and did not need it. I was up before it rang, dressed in jeans and my old green T-shirt, and out the door with a thermos by half past five.

The sky was just going gray over the east fence when I pulled into Dad’s yard at six. The light was on in the machine shed.

He was already there, sitting on an overturned bucket by the cold woodstove, drinking coffee out of his old thermos cup. The Farmall was parked inside the big door.

He looked up when I came in. He did not ask me what I was doing there.

“Dad,” I said, “the show doesn’t thresh until Wendell gets the steam engine fired. That’s not till noon.”

“I know it.”

“I was thinking we could start a little earlier. With your tractor.”

He took a long drink of his coffee. Then he reached in his shirt pocket and handed me the keys.

I want you to know that I nearly cried right there in that shed. But I did not, because then he would have had to say something about it, and neither one of us wanted that.

“I’ll follow you,” he said. “You drive her.”