The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

The rest of the sale went the way sales go. The corn head sold. The gravity wagons sold.

The last hay rack of junk went for twenty dollars to a boy who wanted the old tractor seats.

By three o’clock the field was mostly empty, and trailers were pulling out in a line.

The young farmer came back at four with a pickup and a header trailer.

He and a friend took the flex head off and loaded it on the trailer, and then the young farmer drove the combine itself out onto the gravel, with the flashers going.

I stood in the yard and watched it go down the road.

It was still daylight, the low gold kind you get in late September, and the dust hung behind it like a long brown flag.

I could see a little of the cab from the yard, and I knew the cap was in there.

Ione came out and stood beside me. She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, “We’ve got eleven pies left. You want to take some to the young couple from Frost?”

“I do,” I said.

She went back in. I stood there until the combine went over the hill by the Brekke place and I could not see it anymore.

I want to tell you that Trent came back and got the toolbox the next week. He did not.

It was still in the shop at Thanksgiving, and at Christmas, with his name taped on the top drawer in my handwriting. I did not move it. The door stayed unlocked.

Then in March, on a Saturday morning, I came out to do chores for the barn cats and there were fresh tire tracks in the snow by the shop.

The toolbox was gone. On the workbench where it had sat, there was a folded piece of paper held down with a socket.

It said, in the square block printing Orrin taught him at our kitchen table: Thank you for the toolbox. I’m sorry about the sale. That was all. No name. It did not need one.

I kept the note. It is in the Bible on my nightstand, at the Psalm Orrin’s mother marked for his baptism.

The young couple from Frost are farming the ground this year, and doing it well. They planted beans on the eighty by the road again.

When I drive past it, I think about that half circle of caps in the sun, and that big machine running clean for all of them.

At Christmas, the young farmer from down by the Iowa line sent me a picture in a card.

It was the combine in his own field, with the grain tank full of corn, and his boy standing on the ladder, waving. On the back he wrote, “Cap’s still on the hook.”

I put that card on the refrigerator, and it is there now.

Some days I stand in the kitchen and look at it, and I think about the man who hung that cap there, and the way a crowd of neighbors stood in a field and remembered what kind of man he was.

The combine went down the road that afternoon, and Trent left before the sale lunch.