The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

The first afternoon

We were in the field by three. We took it slow up the first windrow while Hoyt walked beside it watching the pickup reel lift the vines.

The peanuts came off the vines and up into the basket, and the vines blew out the back onto the ground.

We had a drying trailer from the buying point hitched behind the picker.

When the basket filled, it dumped into the trailer, and when the trailer was heaped, Beau pulled up with the truck and swapped it for an empty one.

Clayton drove the tractor. I rode the platform on the picker with one hand on the rail, watching the basket and the reel and listening for anything that sounded wrong.

Hoyt and Beau ran the full trailers twelve miles to the buying point outside Dawson and brought back empties.

That first afternoon and evening we picked twenty acres, running on under the tractor lights until the dew came down near ten. You cannot pick wet vines.

They wrap and choke the cylinder. Hoyt called it and we all stood around the tailgate in the yard light, too tired to talk.

One hundred sixty acres left. Three days.

Inez

Saturday morning, before the dew lifted, Hoyt’s mama walked over from her house with a basket of sausage biscuits wrapped in a dish towel.

She is a small woman now. She walks with a cane. She would not let any of us carry the basket.

“Hoyt told me about Lamar,” she said to me in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, Inez.”

“Don’t you be sorry. You didn’t do it.” She set the basket on the counter. “His brother would have been ashamed. I have half a mind to go over there.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “Not today.”

She looked at me a while. Then she nodded and patted my hand. “Then I’ll pray,” she said. “And I’ll cook. That’s what I’ve got.”

Inez cooked for us all four days. Dinner at noon in the field, supper at whatever hour we quit.

She did it on that cane with a bad hip, and she never once complained in my hearing.

The second day

Saturday was hot and bright. The sky over the pines on the east side of the field was as blue as a robin’s egg.

You would never have known there was a storm anywhere in the world.

The dew lifted by nine thirty and Clayton had the tractor running before I got my hat on.

He had greased the picker at first light, kneeling by the right wheel with Daddy’s gun, counting under his breath.

We ran it all day without stopping except to swap trailers. Clayton ate his dinner on the tractor seat.

I ate mine standing on the platform. The basket filled and dumped, filled and dumped, over and over, all through the heat of the afternoon.

Around three, a belt started squealing. Hoyt and I had it tightened in eleven minutes.

Around five, the picker choked on a wad of grass at the end of a row, and Beau cleared it with his hands while Clayton held the clutch in.

We ran on under the lights until the dew came back down near eleven.

Then we quit and ate Inez’s chicken and rice at the kitchen table, and nobody said grace longer than it needed to be.

We had picked fifty-two acres that day. Daddy would not have believed it. Hoyt checked the hour meter and shook his head.

One hundred eight acres left. Two days.