The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

What the neighbors did

I have to tell you about the neighbors, because I would not be telling it right if I left them out.

Saturday afternoon, a pickup I knew pulled up at the end of the field. It was a man named Wilburn who farms cotton on the other side of the creek.

He did not have a peanut combine. What he had was a second truck and an extra drying trailer he had borrowed from the buying point.

He did not ask us anything. He just hooked on to the next full trailer and ran it to Dawson, and came back with an empty, and did it again.

He ran trailers for us all day Sunday and half of Monday, and he would not take a dollar for it.

The ladies from our church brought supper Sunday night, two coolers of it, and left it on Inez’s porch so nobody had to stop.

Somebody had heard. In a small place, somebody always hears.

Nobody said a word to us about Lamar. Not one person. They just showed up and did what needed doing and went home.

That is the way it is done here, and it is the best way I know.

Sunday

Sunday morning we did not go to church. I hated it, but there was no choice.

Inez sat in Hoyt’s truck at the end of the field with the windows down and listened to the service on the radio station that carries it.

I could hear the hymns faintly when the picker turned at the end of the row. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Clayton heard it too. He took his cap off at the turn row and put it back on before he started the next windrow.

By Sunday afternoon, the sky began to change. It stayed hot and bright straight overhead.

But far off, past the pines to the southwest, the clouds were piling up gray along the edge of the sky, low and flat on the bottom.

I stood on that platform with one hand on the rail and watched them. The air had that heavy, still feel it gets before weather.

My hat stuck to my forehead. My white sun shirt was soaked through to my skin.

Behind us the trailer was heaped. Ahead of us the windrows lay in the red dirt, row after row of vines turned upside down, waiting.

Clayton looked back at me over his shoulder from the tractor seat and I gave him a nod. Keep going.

We picked fifty-four acres Sunday, running under the lights until the dew came down near eleven. Fifty-four left.