Combine The tractor puffing diesel crawled along the swath, the hayfork pulling vines into the combine’s maw, and the high bin filled with damp green peas— a boy’s first shirtless job, baked nut-brown from dark all through the burning day until the Sound beyond the dikes bled red. Gulls in the fields, crows in the bramble hedges, a field mouse squirming on the fork boy’s tines and the old mechanic standing in white overalls mid-field as if he’d lost his train of thought. Those hands of his, work-swollen knuckles, grease in the whorls a boy discerned his future in,…
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