Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The shredder

Royce came the next Wednesday. He did not call first. He just drove into the yard at seven in the morning, got out, walked to the shop, hooked the stalk shredder to our tractor, and went to the field.

He shredded that whole six hundred acres in four days. He didn’t come to the house for lunch.

He ate in the tractor cab. When he was done, he parked the tractor in the shop and left the key on the seat.

I would like to tell you he and Travis shook hands and it all went back to the way it was. That is not what happened.

What happened is that Royce came to Thanksgiving at his folks’ place that year, even though he knew we would be there.

He sat at the far end of the table. He said grace when Hollis asked him to, short and plain.

When he was leaving, he stopped beside Travis’s chair and stood there a second. Then he put his hand on Travis’s shoulder, just for a moment, and went out the door. That was all. It was enough for Thanksgiving.

The grades

The classing office grades every bale, and Travis likes the gin to print the grades on paper so he can hold them.

He was sitting at the kitchen table when they came in the first week of December, still moving slow, with his reading glasses on the end of his nose.

He went down the whole list with his finger. I watched his face. When he got to the bottom, he took his glasses off and laid them on the paper and looked at me.

“Every one,” he said. “Not a spotted bale in the bunch. Not a dime docked for weather.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just put my hand on top of his.

That spring, before we planted, the boys went out to the shop with a white paint marker and unfolded the yellow tarp from module number fourteen, the last one we tied down before the rain.

They spread it out on the shop floor, and Rhett got down on his knees, and in big careful letters, the way you write on a cast, he wrote the date we tarped them.

Then Cade signed it. Then Rhett. Then they made me sign it, and they carried it in to Travis, and he signed it too.

It is folded up on a shelf in the shop now, above the workbench, next to Travis’s daddy’s level and his granddaddy’s two-blade knife.

That was the whole of it. Every module graded clean, and the boys wrote the date on the last tarp.