Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The county road

That was when I saw the pickup. It came down the county road from the east, slow, and it slowed some more as it came even with our turnrow, and then it pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped.

It was Royce.

He sat there with the engine running. I could see him through the windshield, one arm on the wheel, looking across the bar ditch at us.

At the row of yellow tarps. At the boy lying on top of the last one. At me.

Rhett sat up. “Is that Royce?”

“Yes,” I said.

Rhett looked at the pickup and then at me, and I watched him put it together. He was fifteen, not stupid. His face went red, and he started to get up.

“Stay where you are,” I said.

He stayed. Cade got up off the ground and stood at the end of the module with the sledge still in his hand, not raised, just holding it, the way a man holds a tool he has been working with all day.

I could have climbed down and walked across that bar ditch and told Royce exactly what I knew and what I thought of him, in front of my boys, with the wind carrying every word.

I didn’t. I sat on top of that module and looked at him. Then I lifted my hand, the way you do on a county road, two fingers up, and I held it there.

He sat there maybe a full minute. He did not lift his hand back. Then he put the pickup in gear and drove on west, toward the rain, and we watched him go until he was just dust.

The rain

The first drops hit the windshield at twenty past six, while we were driving home. By seven it was coming down hard, the way it rarely does out there, steady and cold and loud on the barn roof.

I made the boys supper. I don’t remember what. I remember that Rhett fell asleep at the table with a fork in his hand, and Cade carried him to the couch the way Travis used to carry him when he was little.

It rained all that night and all the next day and all the next night. I drove out every morning at first light and walked the row.

Every tarp held. Every rope stayed tight. The water ran off those crowns and soaked into the stubble and never touched our cotton.

On Monday I drove to Lubbock and sat with Travis. He was up walking the hall with a walker by then, in a gown and his own boots, and he made me show him my hands. He held them for a long time and didn’t say anything.