Fourteen Cotton Modules Before the Rain

Uncle Hollis

Royce’s father is Hollis Pruitt, Travis’s uncle. He was seventy-four that fall, a big slow man who had farmed cotton and run cattle on the same section for fifty years and had never once been late to church.

He drove into our yard two days after Orval found the knife, in the middle of the afternoon, in his old pickup with the hay spears on the back.

He got out slow and walked to the porch and did not come up the steps.

“Kendra,” he said. “Is Travis up?”

“He’s asleep,” I said. “It’s the medicine.”

Hollis nodded. He looked down at his boots for a long time. Then he looked at me, and he looked older than I had ever seen him.

“I heard about the tarps,” he said. “I heard about the knife. I asked Royce last night. He didn’t say no.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to.

“I raised him,” Hollis said. “Some of this is on me. I know that. I know I compared those two boys more than I should have. I know what that did.”

He stopped. “But that don’t make what he did right. Nothing makes that right.”

“No sir,” I said.

“What did you pay for the tarps?”

“Eighteen ninety-seven fifty,” I said. “Fifteen of them.”

Hollis nodded again, like he had expected about that. “He’ll bring it Saturday. In cash. To you, not to Travis. I want him to hand it to the woman who climbed up there.”

Saturday

Royce and his father pulled into our yard at ten o’clock that Saturday morning in Hollis’s pickup.

It was a clear, still, sunny day, the kind you get on the South Plains after a rain, with the sky washed clean and the stubble steaming a little in the sun.

Travis was sitting in a lawn chair on the porch with a pillow behind his back and a blanket on his knees, and he started to get up when he saw the pickup, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Stay where you are,” I said, same as I had told Rhett.

The boys were in the shop. They came out and stood in the shop door and did not come any closer. Cade had a wrench in his hand. Rhett had his hands in his pockets.

Royce got out of the passenger side. He did not look at the porch. He did not look at the shop. He walked straight to the tailgate and stood across it from me.

He took an envelope out of his jacket and opened it and counted the money out onto my tailgate. Hundreds, mostly, and some twenties. He counted slow and careful, out loud, the way you count out money at a cattle sale.

“Eighteen hundred,” he said. “Eighteen ninety. Eighteen ninety-seven.” He laid down a fifty-cent piece on top of the pile. “Fifty.”

Then he stood there with his hands flat on my tailgate and looked at the money and did not look up.

Hollis stood back by the pickup with his arms folded and didn’t say a word.

I picked up the money and squared the stack and put it back in the envelope. Royce still had not looked at me.

“Royce,” I said.

He looked up.

“Travis is going to be laid up till spring,” I said. “Next week we’ve got to shred stalks on that six hundred, and somebody has to run the shredder, and it isn’t going to be him and it isn’t going to be me.”

Royce stared at me like he didn’t understand the words.

“We’ll pay you the going rate,” I said. “If you want it. If you don’t, that’s all right too.”

He looked at me for a long time. His jaw worked. Then he looked past me, toward the porch, where his cousin was sitting in a lawn chair with a blanket over his knees.

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He just nodded once, short, and turned around and walked back to his daddy’s pickup and got in and shut the door.

Hollis touched the brim of his hat. Then he got in and they drove off, slow, the way you drive off from a place where something has been settled.