The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

Vance did not start the chant again right away. He stood on the back of his pickup a long minute.

Then he did something I have never seen an auctioneer do in the middle of a sale. He turned and looked into the crowd.

“Hal,” he said into the microphone. “Hal Brekke. Come on up here a minute.”

Hal Brekke is seventy years old. He farmed the place across the road from us for forty-four years, and he and Orrin traded work every spring and every fall of Orrin’s life.

Hal came slowly through the crowd, in his old tan chore coat, his cap in his hand.

Vance reached down off the pickup and held the microphone out to him. Hal looked at it like it might bite.

He had never held one in his life, I am sure of it. But he took it, and he turned around, and he faced all those men.

I turned the throttle down to low idle from the landing, reaching in, so they could hear him.

“Some of you heard this morning that Orrin Habeck’s combine has a cracked frame,” Hal said. His voice shook a little at first, and then it did not.

“I’m here to tell you I was under that machine two winters ago, every day for three weeks.”

“Orrin and I put a new feeder chain in it, and new bearings on the top shaft, and we went over that frame with a wire brush and a light, because that’s how Orrin did things. I held the light. There is no crack in it. There never was.”

He stopped. He looked down at the stubble for a second. The whole crowd was quiet, the way a church is quiet.

“I knew Orrin since he was born,” Hal said. “I was at his baptism and I was at his funeral. He never sold anybody a bad piece of iron in his life, and he’s not going to start now that he’s gone.” Then he took a breath. “I’ll open at fifty thousand.”

Vance took the microphone back. He did not say anything about it. He just started chanting, and this time the chant had something to work with.

“Fifty thousand, now fifty-five, who’ll give me fifty-five,” and a hand went up by the grain cart, and Sig yelled “Yep,” and Vance went to sixty.

The young farmer from down by the Iowa line had his card up before Vance finished the word. Sixty. A man from up by Mapleton went sixty-five.

The young farmer went seventy. Hal stood beside the pickup with his cap in his hand and did not bid again. He did not need to.

It went to seventy-five. To seventy-eight. Two men were going back and forth now, the young farmer and the man from Mapleton, and the crowd was watching them the way you watch a ball game.

Eighty. Eighty-two. The man from Mapleton stood a long time at eighty-two, thinking, and then he shook his head.

The young farmer bid eighty-four. Vance chanted for eighty-five three times, looked all around the crowd, and then he said, “Sold, eighty-four thousand dollars.”