The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

They had their own machinery. Mine was going to sit in the shed and lose value every year until I sold it.

I called Vance Ostrem in July. He and his crew had sold half the farms in Faribault County, and he had sold Orrin’s dad’s line of machinery back in 1998.

When he came out to look, he took his cap off in the yard before he said anything.

“I’m sorry about Orrin,” he said. “He was the kind of man you could sell a sale for. Everything he owned was greased and shedded.”

That was true. Orrin was particular. The combine, a big Class 7 machine from the mid-2000s, had a little over four thousand engine hours and about three thousand on the separator, and every one of those hours was written down in a spiral notebook in the cab.

We set the date for the last Saturday in September. Vance said it was the right time.

Every farmer in three counties would be thinking about harvest, and anybody whose combine was tired would be looking hard at a good used one.

The young couple renting the ground combined the beans on the eighty along the road the week before, so the sale could sit right there on the stubble.

Vance’s crew came on Thursday and lined everything up in rows, the way they do.

First row was the small stuff. Hay racks loaded with log chains, jacks, a welder, buckets of bolts, the cream cans from the old barn, Orrin’s dad’s anvil.

Second row was the tillage, the planter, the field cultivator, the gravity wagons.

At the end of the third row, by itself, sat the combine with the flex head on the front and the corn head on its cart beside it.

Vance had decided to sell the combine and the flex head as one lot, and the corn head after it.

Trent called me on the Wednesday before the sale. It was the first time he had called since the funeral, when he stood at the back of the church and left before the lunch in the basement.

“I hear you’re selling it all,” he said.

“I am,” I said. “I’d have called you. I left you a message in July.”

“I got it.” He was quiet for a while. “I suppose you know I always figured Dad would leave that place to me.”

I did know that. I had heard it in his silences for twenty-six years.

I had heard it when he looked at the shop and the bins and the black dirt like he was looking at something somebody had borrowed and not returned.

“Your dad left it to me, Trent, and the land will come to you and your sister’s kids when I’m gone. Nothing about that has changed. I’m only selling iron. I can’t run it and I can’t let it rust.”

He made a sound I could not read. “I might come out,” he said, and hung up.

His sister, Orrin’s daughter by that same first marriage, lives in Arizona and has three little ones.

She sent flowers to the sale, of all things, a pot of yellow mums the clerk set on the trailer step. Trent sent nothing. Trent came.