The Threshing Machine Dad Rebuilt

The Last Bundle

Wendell had the steam engine fired by noon, and the show’s own threshing was set for one o’clock on the other side of the grounds. The rack was nearly empty. There were maybe six bundles left.

Dad looked down at me on the tractor. He waved me up.

I did not understand at first. Then I did.

I climbed down off the Farmall and left her running and went up the steps to the platform. Dad moved over and made room for me beside the lever.

I was 8 years old the first time I stood on a threshing platform. It was Grandpa’s machine, belted up for one last run at a neighbor’s anniversary picnic, the summer before Grandpa sold it. Dad lifted me up there and put my hand on the lever with his hand over mine.

“When I say,” he told me then, “you pull.”

I remember the wood was warm from the sun. I remember the whole machine shaking under my feet like it was alive. I remember being scared, and then being so proud I could not breathe.

Now Dad was 85, and I was 53, and his hand was spotted and thin. He put it over mine on the lever, the way he had before.

Lorenz pitched in the second to last bundle. Grady pitched in the last one. It went in heads first, clean.

“When I say,” Dad said, in my ear.

I waited. The cylinder took the bundle. The straw went blowing out the stacker. The last of the oats came rattling down the spout.

“Now,” Dad said.

I pulled the lever. The feeder stopped.

I looked down and there were tears on my father’s face. He did not wipe them. He just kept his hand over mine on that lever, and we stood there together while the machine ran itself empty.

Then he squeezed my hand, twice, the way he patted my shoulder at the end of that field when I was eleven.

That was all. It was the most I ever needed.

What Grady Said

I throttled the Farmall down and kicked her out of gear, and the belt slowed and the machine wound down like a big animal settling in for a nap. The crowd started to clap. It went on a long time.

Dad came down the steps slow. When he got to the bottom, Grady was standing there in the straw with the fork still in his hand.

They looked at each other.

“Arlis,” Grady said. His voice was rough from the dust. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it. I just stood up there and it came out.”

Dad did not answer right away. I held my breath.

“I couldn’t have got her here without you,” Dad said finally. “Too wide for my trailer. You hauled her six miles and never scratched the paint.”

Grady swallowed.

“And that’s a fair load you pitched,” Dad said. “For a first time.”

Grady’s face did something I had never seen it do. He looked down at the ground. He nodded. He could not say anything at all.

Then he turned around and walked across the grass to where Wendell was standing by the rope, and he asked him for the microphone.

Wendell looked at him a long second. Then he went to his golf cart and got it out and handed it over.

Grady switched it on. The speaker on the pole crackled.

“Yesterday I told you all I rebuilt this machine,” he said. “I didn’t. Arlis Bontrager did. Four winters in his shed. He’s 85. All I did was haul it.” He stopped. “That’s all. I’m sorry I said it.”

He handed the microphone back to Wendell and walked off toward the campground.

Nobody clapped for that. It was not the kind of thing you clap for. But I watched three or four of the men at the rope reach out and clap him on the back as he went past, and one of them said something to him I could not hear.

Rhoda went after him. At the corner of the swine barn she caught up, and she took his arm, and they walked on together.