Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The arithmetic

I have kept our books for eighteen years. When I am scared, I do arithmetic.

Fourteen modules. About fourteen bales to the module, give or take, which is close to two hundred bales of lint at around four hundred eighty pounds a bale.

Cotton was bringing about sixty-five cents a pound that fall. Two hundred bales times four hundred eighty pounds times sixty-five cents is a little over sixty-two thousand dollars, before the seed, before the gin takes its share.

Call it sixty thousand. Our entire year, sitting on the ground in a south wind with the tops cut open.

I knew what rain does to a module with no cover. The top soaks first and the water works down. Wet seed cotton heats up, and heated cotton turns yellow and spotted, and then it starts to rot.

The gin will still take it, most of the time. But the classing office grades every bale, and wet, spotted cotton comes back docked hard on color. Some of it would come back as nothing but a bill.

I looked at my watch. Twelve twenty. I looked west, where the weather would come from. The sky was bright and blue overhead, but way out past the stubble there was a line of gray sitting low on the horizon.

Six and a half hours, maybe. Less if it came early.

Why I did not call

People have asked me since why I didn’t call the sheriff. I did think about it, standing there with my hand on that module.

A deputy would have come. He would have written it down and taken pictures and asked if I had any idea who did it, and I would have told him, and he would have driven out to talk to Royce.

And at seven o’clock that evening the rain would have come down on fourteen open modules while all of that was getting written down. A deputy can do a lot of things. A deputy cannot tarp a module.

I thought about calling Travis. But Travis was two days out of surgery, flat on his back, on enough medicine to drop a horse, and if I told him, he would have tried to get out of that bed. I knew him.

I thought about calling the neighbors. But every farmer within forty miles had heard the same forecast, and every one of them was out in his own field that afternoon, stripping as fast as he could before the rain.

So I did not call anybody. I got back in the pickup and called my boys.

The farm store

Cade answered on the second ring. He was seventeen that fall, a senior, and he and his brother were home doing the Saturday chores.

“Somebody cut the tarps on the modules,” I said. “All of them. Get the long ladder, the sledge, and every piece of rebar in the barn, and meet me at the turnrow in an hour.”

There was a little pause. Then Cade said, “Yes ma’am,” and hung up, and I loved him for not asking one single question.

I walked straight past the feed and up to the counter, where a woman named Darlene has been ringing up farmers since before I was married.

“How many module tarps do you have?” I said.

Darlene looked at me over her glasses. She had heard the forecast too. “You lose some to the wind?”

“I lost all of them,” I said. “Fourteen.”

She went in the back and was gone a long time, and when she came out she said, “I counted twice. I’ve got fifteen.”

“I’ll take fifteen.”

They were the heavy ones, forty feet long, made for the old rectangular modules, rolled and boxed and weighing better than thirty pounds apiece. They came to $126.50 each, and with our farm exemption there was no tax.

Eighteen hundred ninety-seven dollars and fifty cents. I put it on the farm account and didn’t let myself think about it. That was money we had set aside for the property tax in January.

When we had the last one in the bed, she went back inside and came out with two coils of rope and a box of tarp ties and set them on top.

“Those are on me,” she said. “Go on. You’re burning daylight.”

I said thank you, and she patted the side of the pickup twice, and I drove.