Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The cousin and the lease

My name is Kendra Pruitt. I was forty-one that fall. My husband, Travis, is forty-four, and we farm dryland cotton outside Lamesa, Texas, on ground that does not belong to us.

The six hundred acres behind those modules belonged to an old widow in Lubbock who had inherited them from her father.

For twenty years her renter had been Travis’s cousin Royce. Royce is four years older than Travis. They grew up a mile apart and were baptized the same Sunday in the same stock tank, the story goes.

But Royce got tired, or got careless, or just got unlucky. What I know is that his yields slipped three years running, and the widow’s son started driving out to look.

Two winters ago she called Travis and asked if he would take the lease. Travis told her he would not take a cousin’s ground out from under him.

She told him she was moving it either way, and he could have it or the big operator from Seminole could.

Travis drove over to Royce’s place that same afternoon to tell him to his face before he heard it at the gin.

Royce stood in his shop door and listened, and when Travis was done he said, “You always did want what I had.”

Travis had never wanted a thing Royce had. But I understood it anyway.

Royce’s daddy had compared those two boys their whole lives, at the dinner table and the ball field and the stock show, and Royce had come out second more often than not.

Some men carry a thing like that for twenty years and set it down.

Royce carried it, and then he picked up the lease on top of it, and he quit coming to Sunday dinner at his folks’ place if he knew we would be there.

The back

Travis had been hurting since the spring. Two disks low in his back, the doctor said, worn down to nothing from thirty years of tractors and pipe and sitting crooked in a stripper cab.

The surgeon in Lubbock wanted to fuse them in September. Travis looked at the man like he had suggested we move to the moon.

“I’ve got a crop in the field,” he said. “I’ll come see you when it’s in the module.”

So he stripped it himself. Every acre. I ran the boll buggy and the boys ran the module builder after school and on weekends, and Travis sat in that stripper cab twelve hours a day with a bag of ice behind him.

Some nights he couldn’t get out of the cab by himself. Cade would climb up and help him down the ladder, and the two of them would walk to the pickup slow, and nobody would say a word about it.

It was a dry year. We made about a third of a bale to the acre, which is poor, but it is a crop, and every bale of it was spoken for: the operating note at the bank, the rent, the seed bill, Christmas.

The last module was built on a Tuesday. Travis climbed down out of the stripper, stood at the edge of the field looking at those fourteen white loaves in a row with their yellow tarps, and said, “All right. Now they can cut on me.”

They operated Thursday morning. Two rods and four screws, the surgeon said, and Travis would be in the hospital until at least Monday, and he would not lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk until spring.

That was where things stood on Saturday when I came around the end of that first module and found the tarp cut open.