The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

A field of rice holds a lot of water. Four inches over 160 acres is more water than you would believe. It was going to keep coming for a day or more no matter what.

At noon Truman shut down his tractor and walked over with a cooler. He had two sandwiches in it, and he handed me one and Wes the other, and when I tried to say he should eat, he said he had already eaten in the truck.

I am pretty sure that was a lie. I ate the sandwich anyway. It was bologna and cheese on white bread, and it was the best thing I ate all year.

While we ate, Truman said, “Your top line’s the problem. Long as that spill’s open, you’re fighting his whole field.”

Wes said, “I’m not going up there and putting his boards back in. That’s his side.”

Truman nodded slow. “No. But that’s your side.” He pointed at our ground just below the line levee. “I can throw you up a new levee right across your top paddy, and cut you a drain along the turn row to the road ditch. Then his water has to go around you, not through you.”

Wes looked at him a long minute. “That’s going to cost you a day.”

Truman said, “I’ve got a day.”

So that afternoon he ran the levee plow across the top of our field, back and forth, throwing up a fresh ridge of clay just below the old spill. Wes and I followed behind with shovels, packing it down and cutting a ditch along the turn row so Dwight’s water ran off toward the county road.

It was not pretty. It was not engineered. But by four o’clock that new levee was holding, and the water coming out of Dwight’s spill was turning and running down the turn row ditch instead of across our rice.

That was the first time all day I let myself sit down.

Our son Beckett got off the bus at three-thirty. He is eleven.

He came walking down the gravel road from the bus stop, and when he saw all three of us out in the field with mud to our knees, he threw his backpack down in the grass and came running.

“What happened?” he said.

Wes did not tell him all of it. He said, “Somebody let water on the field. We’re getting it off.”

Beckett said, “Who?”

Wes said, “Go to the shop and find yourself a shovel.”

He came back with his grandpa Lindvall’s sharpshooter. It is a long, narrow spade, the kind you use for ditching and digging fence posts, with a worn hickory handle wrapped in black electrical tape where it cracked years ago.

It hangs on two nails by the shop door. Nobody uses it.

Wes saw what he had and did not say anything about it. He just took Beckett to a levee near the bottom where the water was shallow and showed him where the low spot was.

“Cut it there,” he said. “Narrow at the top. Wider at the bottom. Throw the dirt downhill, not back in.”

Then Wes did something I will never forget. He stepped back on the levee and folded his arms and let the boy do it himself.

Beckett is not big. That buckshot clay was hard, and that old sharpshooter was heavy. He stabbed at it and pried and threw and stabbed again. His face got red. Twice I saw Wes’s hand start to move and then go back under his arm.