Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The boys

They were waiting at the turnrow when I got back a little after one. Cade had the long aluminum ladder off the rack and leaning against the first module.

Rhett had the sledge over his shoulder and a five-gallon bucket of rebar stakes at his feet.

Rhett was fifteen, built like a fence post, his feed store cap pulled down to his eyebrows and his jaw set exactly the way his daddy sets his.

Cade had a black cap and his old gray hoodie, and he was looking down the row at those split tarps lifting and falling in the wind. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

“Who did this?” Rhett finally asked.

I had already decided what I would say. “It doesn’t matter right now,” I said. “What matters is that rain. We’ll talk about the rest after.”

Cade looked at me for a second longer than usual. He knew about the lease. He knew who quit coming to Sunday dinner. I could see that he knew. But he nodded and went for the first box.

The first tarp

The tarp has to go over the top, which is ten feet up. Somebody has to be standing on the module to pull it, and somebody has to be on the ground to feed it up and tie it down.

I decided that somebody on top was going to be me. I am the lightest of the three of us, and I was the one who had to answer to Travis if anybody fell off.

I climbed the ladder in my maroon jacket with my braid tucked down inside the collar. It came loose before I was halfway up.

The top of the module was packed hard but it gave a little under my knees, like a mattress with something stiff inside.

The wind on top was a different animal than the wind on the ground. It came across that open stubble with nothing between us and New Mexico, and it shoved at me like a big dog wanting through a door.

“Don’t stand up, Mama,” Cade called. “Stay on your knees.”

I stayed on my knees.

The old tarp was split right down the crown. Before I climbed up, Cade had said we should leave the cut ones on, underneath the new ones, as one more layer.

Two layers of torn tarp is still better than cotton, he said, and it would save us an hour.

So we left them. I folded each half of the old tarp in toward the middle as best I could and knelt on it to hold it while Cade threw the rope up to me.

The new tarp comes rolled with a rope tied at one end. Cade threw the rope up, I caught it on the second try, and I started hauling the roll up the side of the module hand over hand.

It weighed thirty pounds rolled. Unrolled in that wind, it weighed whatever the wind wanted it to. The moment the first fold opened, the south wind got inside it and it went up like a sail.

It nearly took me off the back end. I let go of the rope with one hand and grabbed a fistful of cotton with the other and hung on, and the tarp cracked over my head like a bedsheet on a line.

Rhett was already moving. He ran around to the downwind side, jumped, caught the corner that was whipping lowest, and just hung there with his whole weight, his feet off the ground, until the wind gave up and let it fall.

“Got it,” he said, and his voice cracked, and he didn’t care.