Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The pickup coming off our turnrow was Royce’s, and he lifted two fingers off the steering wheel at me the way every man in Dawson County does when he passes you on a dirt road.

I lifted two fingers back. I didn’t think a thing about it. It was a Saturday in early November, a little past noon, and I was only driving out to check the tarps before the weather.

The radio out of Lubbock had been saying it all morning. Rain by seven that evening, heavy at times, and then two more days of it behind that. Three days of rain, on the South Plains, in cotton harvest.

Our crop was sitting at the turnrow in fourteen modules. If you have never seen one, picture a loaf of white bread the size of a boxcar, about thirty-two feet long and ten feet high, packed hard as a hay bale.

A module builder makes them right there at the edge of the field.

The stripper dumps the cotton into a boll buggy, the buggy dumps it into the builder, and a man runs the tramper up and down until it is packed tight.

Then you pull the builder forward, and the module sits on the ground waiting for the gin to send a truck. Some years that is three days. Some years, when the gin is backed up, it is three weeks.

What keeps the cotton good while it waits is the tarp. A heavy tarp, gray on top and yellow underneath, pulled over the top and tied down at the sides, so the rain runs off the crown instead of soaking in.

I came around the end of the first module and stopped walking. The tarp was split from one end to the other, straight down the middle, a clean long cut like somebody had opened an envelope.

The wind had already gotten under both halves and was lifting them like wings. I could see the cotton underneath, dirty white and full of bolls and burrs, the way stripper cotton looks. Across the turnrow, a neighbor’s field still stood white with unpicked bolls.

I walked to the second module. Same cut. The third. Same. I didn’t run. I remember that, because I wanted to run, and I made myself walk the whole row so I would know for sure.

All fourteen. Every tarp slit lengthwise, every one of them flapping in a south wind that was already blowing twenty-five miles an hour and climbing.

I stood at the end of the row with my hand on the last module and thought about the two fingers off the wheel, and about my husband in a hospital bed sixty miles north.