The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

He was there at eight o’clock Saturday morning, two hours before the first item sold.

I saw his pickup pull in along the road ditch while I was helping the church women set up the lunch stand by the shop.

Our church women had run lunch at farm sales for longer than I had been alive.

Ione had the roasters going with sloppy joes and the coffee in the big urns, and there were pies lined up on a folding table, twenty-two of them, under dish towels.

“Is that Trent?” Ione asked, looking out the shop door.

“It is,” I said.

“Well,” she said, and went back to her pies. Ione had known Orrin since he was in diapers. She did not have to say anything else.

The morning was clear and cool, the kind of September morning that smells like dust and diesel and drying corn.

By nine there were sixty pickups along the road and in the yard, and more coming, men in seed caps and canvas coats, a few wives, a few kids.

I walked the rows the way you do. People shook my hand. Men I had known for twenty years told me Orrin kept a nice line.

One old fellow told me he had bought a plow from Orrin’s dad in 1979 and it was still the best plow he ever owned.

Trent spent the whole morning at the combine.

I noticed it, but I did not think much of it at first. A son standing by his father’s best machine. I thought maybe he was grieving it.

I thought maybe he would bid on it, and I would not have minded if he got it at a fair price.

Then the men started coming to me.

The first was a young farmer from down by the Iowa line, maybe thirty, with a little boy on his shoulders.

He had his bidder card folded in his shirt pocket. He found me by the gravity wagons and asked me, kindly, how bad the frame crack was.

“What frame crack?” I said.

He looked embarrassed. “The fellow by the combine said the main frame cracked by the front axle mount and it’s been welded twice. He said Orrin was going to trade it before he passed, because of it.”

“There is no crack in that frame,” I said. “And Orrin was never going to trade it.”

He nodded the way young men nod at a widow, polite and not quite believing.

“I appreciate it,” he said, and walked away, and I watched him go back over and look under the front of the combine with his boy still on his shoulders.

Within the hour, three more men had asked me about it. One asked about the weld.

One asked whether the rotor gearbox was making noise, because he had heard it was. One just said, “Too bad about the frame on that combine,” and patted my arm.

I knew what was happening before I let myself say it.

Trent was standing by the machine where every serious buyer would come to look, and he was telling them, one quiet ear at a time, that it was cracked and welded and on its way out.

He was the son. He would know. Why would a son lie?