The Combine That Ran for the Crowd

His wife squeezed his arm. The little boy jumped up and down without knowing why. The men around them slapped the young farmer on the back, and he grinned and ducked his head.

Through all of it, Trent never once raised his card.

I watched him, at the end. I am not proud of how much I watched him.

He stood at the edge of the crowd while it went past every number he had hoped to pay, and the men he had whispered to that morning stood near him and did not look at him at all.

Nobody said a word to him. That was the hardest part of it, I think, for him. Nobody yelled at him. Nobody called him a liar.

They just turned their shoulders a little, and stood with their backs to him, the way men in farm country do when they have decided something about you.

I shut the header off. Then I shut the separator off. I brought the throttle down to low idle and let it cool for a minute, the way Orrin taught me, and then I turned the key off, and the whole field went quiet again.

That was when I saw the cap.

It was hanging on the hook on the back wall of the cab, behind the seat, where it had always hung.

A green and white seed cap, faded almost gray on the bill, with a grease thumbprint on the front where Orrin always grabbed it to take it off. I had driven the whole fall before with it there.

After he died, I never climbed back up into that cab. I hired the beans done last fall.

I had not been in that seat in a year. And there was his cap, right where he hung it the last time he came down that ladder.

I sat down on the seat. I took the cap down off the hook and held it in my lap, and I put my hand on the inside of it, where the sweatband was dark from his forehead, and I cried for the first time in a long time. Not loud. Just enough.

Out the windshield, the crowd was moving on to the corn head. Vance was chanting again. The world was going on, the way it does.

I thought about taking the cap home. I thought about putting it on the closet shelf with his good hat and his funeral tie.

I thought about Orrin, and what he would want, and then I knew.

I hung it back on the hook.

He wore that cap every fall for nine years in that seat. It belonged to the machine as much as it belonged to me.

I wanted that young farmer, with his wife and his little boy, to climb up into his new combine and find a man’s cap there, and know that somebody had loved this machine before him.

I wiped my face on the sleeve of my denim jacket and climbed down.

The young farmer was waiting at the bottom of the ladder with his wife. He took his cap off.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m sorry I asked you about the frame this morning. I should have known better.”

“You didn’t know anything,” I said. “You were told something. That’s different.”

“Well,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”