Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

The gin truck

The gin was backed up for a week after the rain, the way it always is, with every farmer in three counties waiting on the same trucks.

Our modules sat under their yellow tarps through four more days of sun and drying wind.

The truck came the next Saturday. The driver was Orval Teague, who has been hauling modules for the gin for longer than I have been married. He is sixty-three, with a white mustache and a voice like a gravel road.

A module truck is a thing to see if you have never watched one work.

The bed tilts down behind the cab until the back end is on the ground, and a chain floor runs and pulls the whole module up onto the truck without hardly breaking it.

Orval backed up to module number one, tilted the bed, and walked around it once like a doctor looking at a patient. He lifted the edge of my new tarp and saw the old cut one underneath.

“Well,” he said. “Somebody’s been busy.”

I told him the short version. He listened without saying anything, chewing on a toothpick, and then he looked down the row at all fourteen and nodded once.

“Them’s good ties,” he said. “Who taught you that?”

“My husband,” I said. “Mostly the wind.”

He laughed, loaded number one, and drove off toward the gin. He hauled four more that day, and came back the next week for the rest.

The gin yard

At a gin, before a module goes into the feeder, the yard crew pulls off the tarps and folds them so the farmer can pick them up again. Tarps are not cheap. Everybody keeps track of whose are whose.

When Orval brought in module number fourteen, the last one, he was standing in the yard while the crew pulled the tarp.

He told me later that he saw the new yellow one come off, and then the old cut one underneath it, folded over on itself the way I had found it.

One of the yard hands unfolded it. Something fell out onto the concrete and rang.

It was a pocketknife. A brown bone-handled Case knife, the old kind with two blades, and the big blade was still open.

Orval picked it up. He did not have to look hard. Every man who had ever been around the Pruitt family knew that knife.

Royce’s granddad had given one to every grandson the day each one turned twelve, with the boy’s initials cut into the handle with a nail.

Travis has his. Royce carried his on his belt every day of his life, and took it out to cut twine at the feed store and peel apples at church dinners.

It was his initials on the handle. And it had been folded up inside the tarp on our last module, where he must have stuck it to fold the cut flap over, and then left in a hurry when he saw my pickup coming down the county road.

Orval stood in the gin yard with that knife in his hand. There were maybe a dozen men there that afternoon: truck drivers, yard hands, two other farmers waiting on their own modules, the ginner himself.

Orval is not a speech kind of man. He just held up the knife and said, loud enough for all of them, “Found this folded up in the cut tarp on Travis Pruitt’s last module. Anybody know whose it is?”

Every one of them knew whose it was.

The word

I did not hear about it from Orval. I heard about it from three different people by suppertime, which is how word travels in a place like ours. The parts store, the café, the church parking lot.

Nobody said much to me. They didn’t need to. A woman I barely knew from the next church over stopped me at the post office, put her hand on my arm, and said, “I heard about your tarps, honey,” and that was all.

I did not tell anybody it was Royce. I never once said his name. I didn’t have to.

A knife with a man’s initials on it, folded up in a cut tarp on a laid-up man’s crop, says more than I ever could have.