The Combine Across the Street

The unloading auger was a paper towel tube, tilted out over his right shoulder. The grain bin on top was a plastic bucket with the bottom cut out.

The reel on the front, the big spinning bar that sweeps the crop into the header, was a yellow pool noodle that he cut into six fins and glued to a wooden dowel.

And the candy was his idea too. “Everybody gives the little ones,” he told me one night, scrubbing green off his fingers at the sink. “The little ones are not real. I want to give real ones. Full size.”

“Those cost money, bud.” “I know. I’m gonna pay for it.”

He did. All summer he mowed three yards on our road for five dollars each. He scrubbed stalls at Prairie Veterinary on Saturday mornings, where I work, for a dollar a stall. He walked the ditches after the Fourth of July and returned every can.

He kept it all in a pickle jar on his dresser, and the Sunday before Halloween he dumped it on the bed and counted out ninety dollars even, in ones, quarters, and one very wrinkled ten from his Aunt Connie.

He counted them into the wagon twice that Saturday morning. I know, because I came home from the barn at noon and he had them in four neat rows, with a bar he had pulled out and set apart in the corner of the wagon.

“That one’s for Hallie,” he said. “She likes the one with the almonds.” I could have called Principal Hanson. I had his cell number. I could have called the board chair, who sings in the choir with my mother-in-law.

But the principal was across town at his own son’s football game, the lot was the parent group’s event on the parent group’s insurance, and Amber was the one with the clipboard. Whatever I started would finish in front of Owen, at a volume he would hear.

So I stood up, and I looked around, and across the street I saw Marlow State Bank.

It is a low tan brick building with a drive-up window, a flagpole, and a front lot with room for forty cars. That Saturday the lot was empty. The bank had locked its doors at noon.

In September I had vaccinated six beef heifers behind Tim Larkin’s garage. He manages the bank and keeps a few head on the side, the way half the bankers in our county do. He had stood at the gate with a thermos, and he had asked me how Owen was liking third grade.

I took out my phone and called him from the blacktop, with my other hand still on my son’s shoulder.

“Tim, it’s Heidi Rasmussen. This is a strange one. Can a nine-year-old with a wagon use your front lot for an hour?”

“What’s the wagon for?” “Candy. Full-size bars. He bought them himself. The school lot won’t take him.”

“Who won’t take him?” “Tim.” “I heard you,” he said, and I could hear him walking now, the back door of the bank banging. “Give me ten minutes. I need to find sawhorses.”