The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

Vance climbed up on the back of his pickup, which he uses for a stage, and read the description off his sheet.

Class 7 rotary combine, mid-2000s, a little over four thousand engine hours, a thirty-foot flex head, new feeder chain two winters ago, always shedded.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said into the microphone, “this is the best-kept combine I’ve sold this fall. Who’ll start me at a hundred thousand dollars.”

Nobody moved.

“Eighty,” he said. “Somebody give me eighty.”

Nothing.

“Sixty, then. Sixty thousand dollars. Folks, you will not find another one like this.”

He went to fifty, and to forty, and finally a voice from the back said twenty-five, and Vance took it and started chanting.

It went up in thousands, slow and painful. Twenty-six. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. A man near the front bid thirty-one and looked around like he was a little ashamed of it.

And then it stopped.

Vance chanted and chanted. He pointed at people. Sig worked the crowd with his hand up, calling “Yep” to any man who scratched his nose.

Nobody went to thirty-two. They stood there in the sun with their cards against their legs, looking at the ground.

I looked at Trent. He had his card in his hand, down by his side. He had not bid yet.

He was waiting for the last man to drop, and then he would raise his card once at thirty-two, and it would be his.

I set my coffee cup down on the hitch of the grain cart. I walked through the crowd.

People stepped aside for me without being asked, the way they do for a widow at a sale, and I went to the ladder on the left side of the combine and put my hand on the rail.

“Hold on, Vance,” I said. I did not say it loud. I did not have to. He had already stopped chanting.

I climbed up. The ladder on that combine has six steps and a landing, and I had climbed it every fall for twenty-six years.

My knees knew every rung. At the landing I stopped and looked back down at the crowd.

They were all looking up at me. A hundred and fifty faces under caps.

Trent at the edge of them with his arms crossed again. It was clear and bright, and I could see every face plain.

I did not make a speech. I just opened the cab door and got in.

The cab smelled the way it always did, of old coffee and dust and the grease Orrin kept on his gloves.

The seat was set for me, because I was the one who drove it last.

The fall before he died, I combined the beans while he ran the grain cart, because his back was bad.

I put the key in. I turned it to on and waited for the dash to wake up and the gauges to sweep. Then I turned it over.

That big diesel caught on the second turn, the way it always did when the weather was cool, and settled into a low idle that shook the floor.