The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

A combine at idle is not much to look at. I let it warm for a couple of minutes, because Orrin would have come back from the dead to scold me if I had not.

I watched the oil pressure come up and the temperature needle start to move.

Then I reached for the separator switch and engaged it. You do the separator first, with the engine low.

The whole machine took a breath and started to hum, the rotor turning inside, the shoes and the sieves shaking, the chopper spinning out the back.

I brought the throttle up to high idle. The sound came up into that full, even roar that tells you everything inside is turning the way it should.

No knock. No rattle. No screech of a bad bearing. Just a big machine running clean.

Then I engaged the header.

The feeder house chain began to turn, the new chain Orrin and Hal Brekke had put in two winters before.

The reel on the flex head started to roll, the bats going over and over, slow and steady. The cutter bar sickle went to clattering across thirty feet of front. The auger turned.

I raised the head up off the stubble, all the way, and held it.

Then I lowered it back down until the skid plates touched the ground, and I let the flex work, so they could see every section float. Then I raised it again and left it running.

I opened the cab door and stepped back out onto the landing and stood there with one hand on the rail, and looked down at them.

I still did not make a speech. I said one thing, and I said it to the crowd, not to Trent.

“Walk around it,” I said. “Look under it anywhere you want. If there’s a crack in that frame, I’ll give it to you.”

For a second nobody moved. Then the young farmer from down by the Iowa line set his boy down, and handed him to his wife, and walked up to the front of the machine with a flashlight out of his coat pocket. He got down on his back in the stubble.

Then another man went. And another. Then twenty of them were walking around that running combine, looking under it, bending down, putting their hands on the frame.

Men climbed on the platform to look in the grain tank. One old man put his palm on the side panel and just felt it run.

I stood on the landing and watched them, and I did not look at Trent.

The young farmer slid out from under the front. He brushed bean stems off his shoulders. He looked up at me and shook his head.

“There’s no crack,” he said, loud enough for people near him to hear. “There’s a weld on the left ladder bracket. That’s all.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Orrin bent it on the auger in 2015. He fixed it himself.”

The men nodded. They came out from under, one by one. Some of them glanced over at Trent. Most of them did not have to.

You could see them working it out on their faces, men who had stood beside him that morning and heard him tell them that his father’s machine was cracked.

Trent did not move. He stood with his arms crossed, and then he uncrossed them, and held his bidder card down against his leg, and looked at the ground.