Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

How we learned to do it

After that we did it the way it should have been done from the start. One end at a time. Never unroll more than you can hold down. Never let the wind get under the edge.

I would pull the roll to the upwind end and anchor it with my knees. Cade would walk the rope down the side on the ground.

Rhett would drive a rebar stake at the base of the module with three swings of the sledge.

Then we tied the first pair of side ropes to the first pair of stakes, and I crawled backward along the crown on my knees, unrolling about six feet at a time while the boys tied it down behind me.

“Tight,” I would say, and Cade would cinch the rope. “Go,” and Rhett would drive the next stake. That was all any of us said for a long time. Tight. Go. Tight. Go.

The first module took us twenty-five minutes. I looked at my watch when we finished it and did the arithmetic again, and I felt sick. Twenty-five minutes times thirteen more was almost six hours. The rain would be here in five and a half.

But the second one took fifteen. The third took twelve. By the fifth one the boys knew the whole thing without my saying it, and we were down to about ten minutes a module.

The middle of the afternoon

Somewhere around the sixth module my gloves wore through at the palms. The tarp ropes were new and stiff, and every time I pulled one tight through my hands it took a little more skin.

I didn’t notice until I saw red on the yellow tarp. I wiped my hand on my jeans and kept going. Rhett noticed, though.

He didn’t say anything. He just took his own gloves off and threw them up to me and went back to the sledge bare-handed.

Every now and then I would sit back on my heels and look west. The gray line on the horizon was not a line anymore.

It was a wall, dark blue at the bottom and stacking up taller and taller, with the bright sun still on us like it didn’t know.

My knees ached. My shoulders burned. I prayed some, the way you pray when your hands are busy, not with words exactly.

Just the same few things over and over. Hold off a little longer. Keep my boys safe up here. Let us finish.