The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

I had on a white long-sleeve fishing shirt and my tan cap and my rubber boots, which is what I always wear in the field. By eight-thirty the shirt was stuck to my back.

Wes took the first levee. I took the second one up. We did not talk much.

When I finally broke through my first cut, the water came pouring through around my boots, and I stood in it a second and let it push against my legs.

It is a strange thing to be glad to see water leave. Rice people spend all summer fighting to keep water on. You learn to love the sound of it running in. That morning I loved the sound of it running out.

I looked down the levee and Wes was in the next notch already, sunburned to the neck in a gray T-shirt, throwing clay like a man killing snakes.

We had about a dozen cuts done by nine o’clock, and it was not near enough. You could watch the water spreading across the upper paddies faster than we were draining the lower ones.

That is when Truman Haskins came down the turn row.

Truman has the farm on the other side of the bayou. He is fifty-eight, a deacon, a widower, a big quiet man who has been running rice and soybeans out here his whole life.

He and Dwight have hunted ducks together for twenty years. They share a blind on the reservoir.

He had his tractor on a trailer, and behind the tractor he had his levee plow. That is the disk ridger that builds levees in the spring.

Set right and run along a levee, it will knock one down or cut it open faster than ten people with shovels.

He climbed down and came walking out the levee toward us, slow, the way big men walk in mud.

I did not know what he was going to say. I thought maybe Dwight had sent him. I thought maybe he would tell us to calm down and let the men work it out.

He looked at the water. He looked at the rice. He looked up the field toward the old spill, and I saw him understand it. His face did not change much, but his jaw set.

Then he looked at Wes and said, “Where do you want it?”

That was all. Not a word about Dwight. Not a word about the duck blind. “Where do you want it?”

Wes showed him. Truman went back and unloaded and came down the long levees with that plow, opening wide cuts in the curves where the clay was firm enough to carry the tractor. The water went through them like it had been waiting.

Where the ground was too soft for the tractor, near the top where the flood was deepest, he left it to us. We dug there.

Around ten I heard the well up the hill shut off. It went quiet all at once, the way a diesel does, and for a second all I could hear was water and blackbirds.

I do not know why Dwight shut it off. Maybe the fuel. Maybe he got scared of what he had done. Maybe somebody called him. But his boards stayed out, and his whole top field was still draining down on us.