The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

Lorenz

Lorenz Kinsinger had camped at the show every Labor Day since 1971. His little camper sat at the end of the row by the oats field, and he was sitting outside it in a folding chair when he saw what we were doing.

He is 90 years old now. He walks with a cane on bad days. He got up out of that chair and walked across the grass without it.

“Arlis,” he said. “You’re going to run her.”

“Thought I might.”

Lorenz looked at the machine, then at the belt, then at me. He looked a long time at me.

“I was standing right over there yesterday,” he said.

That was all he said about it. He did not need to say more.

“Well,” he said, “if Arlis is threshing, he’ll need a man on the fork. I pitched bundles for your granddad in 1952. I reckon I can still pitch a few.”

“Lorenz,” Dad said, “you’re 90.”

“I know how old I am,” Lorenz said, and I nearly laughed, because it was exactly what Dad had said to me on the phone four years before.

Two more of the old men came walking over from the campers. One of them was a retired dairy farmer I knew from church. The other had sold seed corn for forty years. Neither one asked a question. They just went to help Wendell with the rack.

Wendell drove the hayrack up beside the feeder with a little gray Ford, the bundles piled on it high and neat. The show plants a patch of oats every spring for this. They cut it in July with an old binder and shock it by hand, and the bundles keep under a tarp until Labor Day.

Lorenz climbed up on the rack. It took him a while. Nobody helped him, because he would not have liked it.

He picked up a three-tine fork and stuck it in the first bundle and stood there, waiting.

The Platform

Dad went up the steps to the platform one at a time, hand on the rail. At the top he stopped and stood and looked out over the grounds, the sun just clear of the trees now, the oats stubble pale and the sky going blue.

He put his hand on the lever.

I climbed up on the Farmall. My hand was on the throttle. I looked at him.

He nodded.

I eased her open. The belt slapped once, loud, against itself. Then it caught and ran smooth, and the whole machine woke up.

There is a sound a threshing machine makes that I do not have a word for. It is a hum and a rattle and a deep breath all at once. The cylinder came up to speed. The fan began to roar. The straw rack started shaking like a dog coming out of a creek.

Dad pulled the lever. The feeder began to run.

Lorenz pitched the first bundle in, heads first, the way you are supposed to. The band cutters took the twine. The cylinder grabbed it and chewed. A second later the straw came blowing out of the stacker pipe in a long, pale cloud, and the oats came rattling down the spout into the wagon box.

Lorenz pitched another. And another. Steady, like he was twenty-five.

Dad stood on that platform with one hand on the lever and the other on the rail and watched every bundle go in.