The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

Dwight Satterfield is my husband’s stepfather. He married Wes’s mother, Glenda, about four years after Wes’s daddy passed. Wes was grown and married by then. Dwight was a widower from over by DeWitt, a good hand with equipment, and he was kind to Glenda.

I will say that for him. He was kind to her. She had been so lonesome after Wes’s daddy died that she quit going to church for a while, and Dwight got her going again. He drove her every Sunday.

When the estate was settled, Glenda kept the home place and the top 160 acres, and Dwight farmed it for her. Wes and I took out a loan and bought the bottom 220 from the estate at a fair price, so his brother and sister could be paid their share.

It was a good arrangement for a long time. Dwight ran his rice and we ran ours. We shared a well line and a combine once in a dry year. He came to Beckett’s ball games.

Then, in June, Dwight came down to the shop one evening and sat on an upturned bucket and asked to buy our 220 acres.

He had the number written on a feed store receipt. It was not a bad number. It was not a good one either. Wes read it twice and handed it back.

Dwight said he was sixty-two. He said he wanted to put the whole place back together under one name while he still had the years to run it. He said it like it was a thing a man had a right to.

The name he meant was his. Not Lindvall. Satterfield.

Wes said no. He said it kindly, but he said it. He said, “Dad farmed this ground forty years. I’m going to farm it forty more, and then Beckett can do what he wants with it.”

Dwight did not argue. He stood up off that bucket and said, “Well, you think about it,” and he drove home. We thought that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it. It was the end of June. This was September, and the rice was gold, and the water was running.

Standing water in ripe rice is a clock, and the clock is short.

When rice is that close, the stalks are dry and brittle near the top and soft near the bottom. Put water back on them and the bottoms go soft as noodles. The heavy heads lay over into the mud. Farmers call it lodging.

Lodged rice is miserable to cut. The header cannot pick it up clean, and what lies in the water too long starts to sprout right on the head or mold.

And a combine cannot work a field with water standing in it. Even on tracks it sinks and ruts and tears up the levees.

We had 220 acres out there making about 180 bushels to the acre, as good a crop as we had ever grown. At around six dollars a bushel that was a little over $200,000.

That was not profit. That was the seed, the fertilizer, the diesel, the land payment, the crop loan, and our living for a year. It was everything.

People have asked me since why we did not just call a lawyer. Or the sheriff. Or the extension office. Or somebody.

Here is the plain answer. Wes’s mother lives in Dwight’s house. She is seventy-one and her heart is not strong, and she loves that man. A lawsuit would have cost Wes his mother long before it saved one bushel of rice.