Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The phone

At about half past two, between modules, Rhett pulled his phone out of his back pocket. I thought he was checking the radar. Instead he held it up, and I heard Travis’s voice say, “Rhett? What’s all that wind?”

I almost told him to put it away. But Rhett had already turned the phone around and was holding it up toward me, kneeling on top of module number seven with a new yellow tarp half pulled and my braid blowing straight out sideways.

“Somebody cut the tarps,” Rhett said. “Mama bought new ones. We’re doing all fourteen. We’re on seven.”

There was a long quiet on the phone. I braced for it.

I thought Travis would start in on how I was going to fall and break my neck, how I should get off of there, how he would come home and do it himself.

He didn’t say any of that. For a long time he didn’t say anything at all. Then I heard him say, not to us, “Ma’am? Would you turn this phone around a minute?”

Rhett told me later what he saw on the screen. A nurse came and took the phone out of Travis’s hand and turned it toward the other bed in the room, where an old man was lying with oxygen in his nose and his hands folded on his chest.

“That’s my wife,” Travis said to him. “Up there on top of that module. That’s my wife.”

The old man raised his head off the pillow and looked at that little screen for a long time. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be.” And then, “You hang onto that one, son.”

Rhett held the phone up for maybe a minute more, and then Travis said, “Go on. Get it done,” and his voice was not quite steady, and Rhett put the phone back in his pocket.

I stayed on my knees a second longer than I needed to. I’m not ashamed to say I couldn’t see the rope very well for a minute.

Then I pulled the next six feet of tarp and said, “Tight,” and Cade cinched it, and we went on.

The last module

By twenty past three we were on number thirteen. The wall in the west had swallowed half the sky.

The light on the stubble had gone a strange yellow, the kind of light that comes before weather, and the wind had swung a little and started to smell like dust and rain.

Thirteen went fast. We were so tired by then that nobody was thinking anymore. Our hands just knew where to go.

Fourteen was the last module in the row, and the hardest, because it sat on the end where the wind came around the corner of the field with nothing to break it.

When I climbed up on top of it, I saw something I hadn’t noticed on any of the others. The old tarp on fourteen was not just split.

Half of it had been folded back over itself, neat, the way you fold a flag, and left lying on the crown.

We were racing the rain. I laid the folded part flat with the rest, knelt on it, and called down for the rope.

That one took us twenty minutes, with the wind pulling at every rope. At ten minutes till four, I pulled the last side rope tight and Rhett drove the last stake and Cade tied it off and slapped the tarp twice with his open hand, like you slap a good horse on the neck.

Fourteen modules. Fourteen yellow tarps. Every rope tight and humming in the wind, every stake driven down to the dirt.

Cade sat down right where he was, in the cotton stubble, with his back against the end of the module.

Rhett climbed up the ladder and lay down flat on top of number fourteen beside me, on his back, with his arms out, grinning up at that dark sky like he had beat it in a footrace.

I sat with my knees pulled up and looked down the row.

My hands were bleeding through my gloves and my hair was a bird’s nest and I could not have lifted my arms over my head if you had paid me.

But they were covered. Every one.