The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

What came after

Lamar sold the six-row combine at Christmas like he said he would.

Before he sold it, he came by and asked Hoyt if we would want him to pick for us one more year, for free, out of the new owner’s hours. Hoyt told him no thank you, kindly.

But at Thanksgiving, Lamar sat at Inez’s table with the rest of us. He said the blessing when Inez asked him to.

He said it short and plain, and he thanked the Lord for family that does the work when other folks won’t. Nobody looked at anybody.

The $9,000 went to the bank on the operating note. The peanut check came in the first week of November.

Inez got her full share. Clayton started welding classes in January, and he paid for his whole first year with no loan.

Wilburn would not take money for hauling, so Hoyt and the boys went and helped him pick his cotton in October. That is the way it is done here.

Beau said the whole thing had ruined him for the road department, and he wanted to farm full time. We will see.

Hoyt says a boy says a lot of things in a good year. But Hoyt has been looking at used combines in the farm paper, and I have seen him do it.

The grease gun

Clayton kept greasing that picker every morning even after the crop was in. I asked him why, and he shrugged.

“Granddaddy always greased it before he put it up,” he said. “He said you put a machine up the way you want to find it.”

The Saturday after the storm, we pulled the old picker back to Daddy’s shed.

The boys washed it down with the hose and let it dry in the sun. Hoyt went over the belts and chains one last time.

Clayton knelt by the right-hand wheel with Daddy’s grease gun and went down the fittings one by one, counting under his breath. Sixty-three.

When he finished, he wiped the gun clean on a rag and laid it back in the bottom of the toolbox, right where I had found it, on the folded shop rag.

He ran his thumb over the scratched initials before he closed the lid.

I stood in the shed door and watched him do it, and I could not say a word.

That was my daddy, kneeling by that wheel. That was my boy. I do not know how to say it any better than that.

Then Beau and Clayton took the old blue tarp from the corner and shook the dust out of it.

They spread it over the top of the picker and tugged it down even on both sides, the way Daddy always had.

I think about that week whenever the weather turns in September.

I think about the clouds piled up past the pines, and the basket filling, and Inez lifting her hand from the porch at the end of every row.

Mostly I think about how close we came to losing it. And about how it was not a lawyer or a judge that saved it.

It was an old machine, a grease gun, two boys, a cotton farmer with a truck, and a woman at a scale house who would not stay quiet.

The old picker went back in the shed, greased, with Daddy’s tarp over it.