The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

Why we did not fight him

People asked me afterward, at church and at the post office and in the school office, why we did not just sue him.

Some of them were pretty hot about it on our behalf, and I appreciated it.

Here is the answer. Hoyt would not drag his late daddy’s brother into a courtroom. He would not do it to his mama, who had cooked Sunday dinner for Lamar for fifty years.

And a lawsuit does not pick peanuts. A lawsuit takes a year. The storm was taking three days.

We could have called around for another custom picker. Hoyt did. He called four men from the shop phone that morning.

Every one of them was booked solid, running day and night, trying to beat the same storm we were trying to beat.

One of them, a man from over toward Sasser, said he was sorry. He said he could maybe get to us the following Thursday.

Hoyt thanked him and hung up and set the phone down very gently, the way he does when he would rather throw it.

I stood in the shop door and looked down the hill toward Daddy’s place.

Daddy’s shed

My daddy farmed peanuts on the hundred acres next to ours for forty-one years. When he passed six years ago, we sold most of his equipment to pay what was owed.

But we kept a few things. We kept his shed, and we kept what was under the tarp in it.

Daddy’s picker was a green pull-type two-row combine, built in 1985. He bought it used in 1991 with money he saved from three good years in a row.

He ran it every fall until the fall he got sick, and he kept it greased like a man keeps a promise.

“Hoyt,” I said. “Daddy’s picker.”

He turned and looked at me. He did not laugh, which I give him credit for. He thought about it a long time, the way he thinks about everything.

“It’s been sitting six years,” he said.

“Under a tarp. In a dry shed. And you know how he kept it.”

“Two rows, Lorna. That’s a third of what Lamar’s machine does.”

“Then we run it three times as long.”

He thought some more. Then he walked to the house and hollered up the stairs for the boys.

The boys

Beau is our oldest. He is 22, and he works for the county road department and helps on the farm every evening and every weekend.

Clayton is 18 and had graduated in May. Beau called in to the road department from the truck, and both of them were with us in five minutes.

We drove down to Daddy’s shed together. The door stuck in its track, the way it always had.

Beau put his shoulder to it and it rolled back, and the light came in across the dirt floor and onto the old blue tarp.

Beau pulled the tarp off in one long drag. The dust came up in the sunlight and he coughed and waved his hand in front of his face.

Underneath it, the paint was faded but the machine was whole.

“Mama,” Beau said, “this thing is older than me and Clayton put together.”

“Then it’s had plenty of rest,” I said.

Clayton walked all the way around it slowly, touching things. The pickup reel. The hitch. The basket up top where the peanuts collect before they dump.

He had ridden on that platform with his granddaddy when he was six years old. I wondered if he remembered.

“I remember the noise,” he said, as if he had heard me. “Granddaddy let me hold the rail.”