The Combine Across the Street

“Sawhorses?” “For the line,” he said. “There’s going to be a line.” I put the phone away and said, “Pull your wagon, buddy.”

“Where are we going?” “Across the street.” “Are we leaving?” “We’re moving,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

He thought about that. Then he wrapped his fingers around the wagon handle, set his shoulders so the header stood straight, and started to walk.

I will remember that walk for the rest of my life.

Elm Street is a two-lane road with no sidewalk on the school side. He pulled that wagon right along the white line with his corn head bouncing on his shoulders, and the pool noodle reel turning, and the ninety-six bars knocking together behind him like a box of loose silverware.

I did not look back at Amber. I could feel her, though. I could feel her standing at the entrance with the clipboard against her chest.

The kids saw us before the parents did.

Then a girl in a witch hat, about eight years old, stepped out from between two cars, looked at the wagon, looked at the bank, and started across the street behind us at a dead run.

“Is that a real combine?” she shouted. “It’s a costume,” Owen called back, not stopping. “But the bars are real.”

We reached the far curb at 2:20. Tim was already there.

He stood at the edge of the bank lot in his flannel shirt and a bank tie he had clearly thrown on over it, holding a little silver tally counter in one hand, the kind they click at the county fair gate as people file in. Behind him, his fourteen-year-old son Zach was dragging two sawhorses across the gravel.

“Heidi,” he said, shaking my hand and then, solemnly, shaking Owen’s. “Young man. That is the finest combine I have seen this year, and I have seen eleven.”

“Thank you, sir,” Owen said. “How many bars did you bring?” “Ninety-six.”

Tim looked past us. Down Elm Street, kids in costumes had started to drift out of the school lot in twos and threes, pulling their parents by the sleeve.

“Then we are going to need more,” he said.

The witch hat girl reached us first. Her name was Brielle. She was eight, she lived on the north side of town, and she carried a pumpkin bucket with a handle that had been mended with duct tape.

Owen reached into the wagon and took out a bar. “For me?” she said.

“One for each,” Owen said. “Happy Halloween.” Brielle looked at the bar. Then she looked up at the combine.

“Can I touch the auger?” “Yes,” said Owen, and he swung it toward her.

She touched it with one finger, the way you touch a horse’s nose. By 2:40 the line ran back across the bank lot, out to the street, and down the side of Elm toward the Casey’s.