The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

At ten o’clock that Friday morning, the dew was coming off our peanuts and I heard a combine start up.

It was the right sound at the right hour. It was coming from the wrong field.

I was standing at the end of our home field with a thermos of coffee in one hand and my truck keys in the other.

I had taken a personal day from the school office so I could run trailers. Everything was ready.

The vines had been lying upside down in the windrows since Monday.

Hoyt had dug them with our six-row digger, and the shaker had turned every plant over so the pods sat up on top, drying in the sun and the sandy red dirt.

Four days in the windrow is about right in a dry week in southwest Georgia.

You pull a handful of pods, crack a few, and look at the hulls and the kernels. Ours were ready. Ours were past ready.

And the sound of Lamar Pickett’s six-row combine was coming from across the road, from the eighty acres he had planted behind his own house, the field he had sworn to me he would pick after ours.

Hoyt came out of the shop wiping his hands on a rag. He stood next to me and listened.

He did not say anything for a long minute. My husband is not a man who wastes words, and he did not waste any then.

“That’s him,” he finally said.

“That’s his field,” I said.

“I know whose field it is, Lorna.”

He climbed into his truck and drove the half mile around by the paved road. I watched the dust from his tires settle on the ditch grass.

Then I set my coffee on the tailgate and waited, because there was nothing else I could do.

The check

I need to back up and tell you how we got there, because people have asked me more than once why we ever paid anybody in advance.

It is a fair question. Here is the honest answer.

Hoyt and I farm 180 acres of peanuts outside Dawson, in Terrell County. One hundred twenty of those acres are ours, paid off the hard way.

The other sixty belong to Hoyt’s mama, Inez, and we farm them on shares.

Inez is 81. She has lived on that land since she married Hoyt’s daddy at nineteen.

Her share of the peanut check is most of what she lives on, along with a small Social Security check that does not stretch the way it used to.

Two years ago our old four-row combine finally quit for good. The repair bill was more than the machine was worth, and a new one costs what a house costs.

So we did what a lot of small growers do. We hired our picking done.

Lamar is Hoyt’s late daddy’s younger brother. He is 69, and he owns the only six-row self-propelled combine on our road.

He picked for us last year at $50 an acre, which is the going rate around here, and we paid him when the peanuts were in.

This year, in August, he came by the house and sat at my kitchen table and drank two glasses of my tea.

He said he was getting old and he wanted to know his money was coming. He asked for it up front.

“Hundred and eighty acres, fifty an acre,” he said. “Nine thousand even. I’ll have you picked before I ever turn a wheel on my own.”

Hoyt looked at me across the table. I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it too.

This was his daddy’s brother. This was the man who taught Hoyt to drive a tractor when he was nine years old.

I wrote the check. Lamar folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket and patted it.

He cashed it the next Monday at the bank in town. I saw it clear on the statement.