The storm
On Wednesday, two days after Hoyt dug, the weather men started talking about a storm in the Gulf. By Thursday night it had a name.
By Friday morning the track had it coming up through the Florida Panhandle and over us by Monday evening.
Every peanut grower in three counties knows what rain does to dug peanuts. A soaking rain knocks the pods off the vines.
They fall in the dirt and you leave them there. What stays on the vine can mold, or sprout, or grade so poorly you might as well have left it.
A long, wet week could cost us a third of the crop, maybe more. And the grade on what was left would drop with it.
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That is not a guess. Hoyt’s daddy lost half a crop to a September storm in the eighties and nearly lost the farm behind it.
Our 180 acres were averaging close to 4,500 pounds an acre. That is a good year.
At about $500 a ton, that was a little over $200,000 lying on the ground in windrows, waiting for the only combine on our road.
That money was the operating note at the bank. It was Inez’s living.
It was Clayton’s welding classes at the technical college in January, which he had been talking about since he was fourteen and had saved half the tuition for himself.
So when I heard Lamar’s combine in his own field at ten o’clock that Friday, I knew exactly what it was costing us.
I had done the arithmetic at the kitchen table at five that morning, before the coffee finished.
What Lamar said
Hoyt was gone about twenty minutes. When he came back, he parked by the shop and sat in the cab a while. I walked over and stood by his window.
“Well?” I said.
“He never shut it off,” Hoyt said. “I stood right by the ladder and he talked to me through the door.”
“What did he say?”
Hoyt looked straight ahead through the windshield at the shop wall. “He said this is his last crop. He’s selling the combine at Christmas. He said he wants his own peanuts safe first, and he’ll get to us when he gets to us.”
“He has our check,” I said.
“I told him that.”
“And?”
“He said he hadn’t forgot.” Hoyt rubbed his face with both hands. “Lorna, he’s got two hundred and forty acres of his own. With that machine, that’s four days, if nothing breaks. The storm gets here in three and a half.”
I want to be fair to Lamar, because it would be easy not to be. He was 69.
He had farmed his whole life, and he was afraid of ending it with a ruined crop. I understand being afraid. I do not understand cashing a family’s check and leaving them to it.