The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

The Crowd

At first it was only the campers. They came wandering over in their slippers with their coffee to see what the noise was.

Then the pancake tent emptied out. Ilene, who has run the pancake tent since her husband passed, came walking over in her apron with the spatula still in her hand.

Then the tractor rows. The men who had been setting up their displays came over one by one and stood at the rope with their arms folded, watching the belt, watching the straw, watching the man on the platform.

By eight thirty there were maybe a hundred people. By nine there were two hundred, easy, stretched all along the rope. Kids sat on their dads’ shoulders. Old women held their hats against the straw dust.

Nobody had a microphone. Nobody needed one.

Wendell came and stood by me at the tractor. After a while he pulled the little notebook he keeps for the show out of his shirt pocket and wrote something in it. I did not ask him what.

A man I did not know leaned over the rope and asked Wendell who was running the machine.

“That’s Arlis Bontrager,” Wendell said. “He built her.”

The man nodded and looked back at the platform. He said it to his wife. His wife said it to the woman next to her. I watched it go down the rope like that, one person to the next, quiet as a hymn passed down a pew.

That was all. No speeches. Just the truth, said plain, one person at a time.

Dad’s Face

I want to tell you what I saw on my father’s face that morning, because it is the thing I will remember when I am old myself.

He had been looking older and older all summer. I had seen it every Saturday. The slow way he got up from a chair. The way he stopped halfway across the yard to catch his breath and pretended to be looking at the sky.

On that platform he looked sixty. Maybe younger.

He stood up straight. He watched the straw. He reached down once and tapped the side of the feeder with his knuckle, listening, the way a doctor taps your chest. He pulled the lever back a hair to slow the feed when Lorenz got ahead of the cylinder, then let it out again.

And I heard him humming. Over all that noise, I could not have heard it, but I saw his lips moving, and I knew the tune because Mom used to sing it at the sink every harvest.

Bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves.

I looked away for a while after that. I watched the belt. I am not ashamed to say it.

Half Past Ten

Grady and Rhoda had camped at the grounds that weekend. They had a little pull-behind camper at the far end, past the swine barn. I found out later that Grady had not slept until almost three in the morning, and then he had slept straight through until ten.

At half past ten I saw him coming across the grounds from the campground.

He was walking fast at first, like he had heard the noise and figured something was wrong with the machine. Then he came around the corner of the swine barn and saw the crowd, and he slowed down.

He stopped at the rope.

He looked at the machine running, straw blowing, belt humming. He looked at the Farmall with its wheels chocked. He looked at me on the seat.

Then he looked up at Dad on the platform, hand on the lever.

And then he looked at all those people. Two hundred of them, standing along the rope in the sun, watching my father run the machine he had built.

I saw his face change. I saw him understand.

Rhoda had come up behind me. I had not seen her come. She put her hand on my shoulder, and then she reached down and took my hand, and she held it hard.

She did not say anything. She did not need to.

Up on the rack, Lorenz stopped pitching.

He stood there a minute with the fork in his hands, looking across the rope at Grady. Then he stuck the fork in a bundle, picked up a second fork off the rack, and climbed down. It took him a long time. His knees are 90 years old.

When he got to the ground, he started walking. Straight across the grass, past the end of the machine, past the rope, right up to Grady.