The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

He did not call Wes. He did not come down to the shop. The boards just went back in.

We cut that field in five days. The rice in the top two paddies had leaned over some, and we lost a little up there, maybe a few acres’ worth where it had laid down too far to pick up clean.

But most of it stood. The rest of the field had never been touched by more than a day of water, and it was beautiful.

The dryer in town ran our moisture at nineteen percent, which is right where you want it. The rice made 180 bushels an acre across the whole field, even with the top end.

It was the best crop Wes ever grew. It was the best crop his daddy ever grew, too. I know because Glenda looked it up in the old books and told us.

We paid the crop loan the first week of October. We paid the land note in November. In December we paid Truman for his diesel and his days, or tried to.

He would not take money. He took a bag of rice and a pecan pie and said that was the going rate.

On the Sunday after harvest, Wes and Beckett went out to the shop with two new nails and the sharpshooter.

They cleaned it. They took off all the clay with a wire brush and oiled the blade and wiped down that old hickory handle. Then they hung it back up by the door, higher than before, on a pair of wooden pegs Wes had cut.

Beckett wrote on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the wall under the shovel. It just says his granddaddy’s name and his, and the year.

Royal Lindvall. Beckett Lindvall.

Wes stood back and looked at it a long time. Then he said, “That’s where it stays.”

Dwight and Glenda still live in the home place. Dwight still farms his 160 acres, and from what I hear he made a fair crop himself, once he got his late field in.

He does not hunt ducks with Truman anymore. Truman got a new partner in the blind, a young man from church, and Dwight hunts alone on the river when he hunts at all.

He comes to Beckett’s ball games sometimes. He sits by Glenda on the far end of the bleachers. He and Wes nod at each other. That is about all.

At Thanksgiving, Glenda asked us all to dinner at the home place. Wes did not want to go. I told him we were going for his mother, and we went.

Dwight said grace. It was short. When he said “amen” he looked across the table at Wes, and for one second I thought he might say something more.

He did not. But he passed Wes the rice first. Our rice, from our field, that Glenda had bought back from the mill in town and cooked herself.

Wes took it and said, “Thank you.” And that was the most the two of them have said to each other since.

Maybe it will be more someday. I pray it will. I have watched Glenda pray for it every Sunday.

But I will tell you what I know for sure.

The rice made 180 bushels, and Dwight’s spill boards stayed in all fall.