The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The year nothing came up

I have lived on this farm outside of Haleyville for fifty-one years, and in all that time there was only one season the ground turned its back on us completely.

That was 1986. I was thirty-one. Raymond was thirty-four, lean as a fence post, with hands that could fix anything that ran on diesel.

We farmed two hundred and twenty acres of corn and beans on gumbo bottomland that flooded in the spring and cracked open in the summer, and most years it gave us just enough and not one dollar more.

That year it gave us nothing.

The corn came up thin in May, like a boy who skipped his growing. Then the rain quit the first week of July and did not come back until the middle of September, which was far too late to matter.

I remember walking the rows in August in my husband’s old boots, pulling an ear here and there, peeling the shuck back with my thumb. Little stunted cobs, kernels shriveled down to nothing, the silk brown and dead.

Raymond did not say much that whole summer. He was not a man who complained. But I would catch him at the kitchen window at five in the morning, coffee going cold in his hand, just looking out at a field he already knew was lost.

We were not the only ones. Half the county was in the same ditch that year. But a hard year does not feel shared when you are the one doing the math at your own table.

By the time the custom cutter would have come, there was nothing in those fields worth the fuel to run the combine. We turned most of it under.

The man from the Federal Land Bank came out in September in a clean car and clean shoes and stood at the edge of our worst field with a clipboard. He was not unkind. He was just doing his arithmetic out loud where Raymond could hear it, and the arithmetic was bad.

We had an operating note of eleven thousand dollars coming due in the spring, and a crop that had brought in less than three. I watched Raymond shake that man’s hand at the end and say thank you for coming, because that is how Raymond was raised, and I wanted to throw the coffee pot at the wall.

That fall I learned what it feels like to add the same column of numbers over and over, hoping it will come out different if you are patient enough. It never does.

I sold eggs in town and cleaned two houses in Haleyville for a widow named Pauline who paid me in cash and never asked why a farm wife needed the work. There is a whole underground economy of women getting families through bad years, and almost none of it shows up in anybody’s books.