The Widow Who Tested Her Family

Forty-One Years on Gravel Road Nine

Jay and I bought our first eighty acres off Gravel Road Nine outside Locust Bend the spring after we married, back when a young couple could still do that on a bank loan and a strong back. Over forty-one years we added to it in bad years and good ones, cotton first, then soybeans once the co-op started pushing the new seed, until we were running four hundred acres of Delta bottomland that Jay’s father used to say was so flat you could watch your dog run away for three days.

That land raised our son. It raised half of Locust Bend’s Friday night football team too, boys who worked our fields in the summer for gas money and showed up at Jay’s funeral in their good boots, standing at the edge of the cemetery in a line like they still worked for him.

Jay died four years ago in April, out by the north ditch, his heart giving out the same way mine tries to now, except nobody got to him in time to argue with it. I kept farming that ground myself for three seasons after, because I did not know who I was without dirt on my hands, and because the alternative, sitting in a house getting smaller by the day while my son’s family grew richer two towns over, felt like a second funeral I wasn’t ready to attend.

I am not a woman built for sitting still. Ask anyone at Locust Bend Baptist, where I have run the potluck sign-up sheet since Reagan was president. Ask the men at the VFW hall, where I still put up the flag every Memorial Day because nobody else gets the fold right. I was not looking to sell that farm. I loved that ground the way you love a person, stubbornly, past the point it made sense.

But the interstate spur came through eleven miles east two years back, and a distribution company started buying up flat land along it the way locusts work a field, and eventually a young man in a good suit named Stuart showed up at my kitchen door with a folder and a number that made my hands shake worse than the heart pills ever did.