The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

It took him almost forty minutes. I watched the whole thing from three levees up.

And then the clay gave all at once, the way it does, and the water came rushing through the little notch he had made and knocked his feet right out from under him. He sat down hard in the mud with that shovel across his lap.

He looked up at his daddy. Wes was laughing, but his eyes were wet, and he would not look at me.

“Your granddad cut his first drain with that shovel,” Wes said. “On this field. He was about your age.”

Beckett did not say anything. He just sat there in the water a minute, holding the shovel, watching the water go.

I had to turn around and face the other way and pretend I was looking at the rice.

We worked until the light started to go gold and long across the field. I would not let us work in the dark, and Wes did not argue. You cannot see a levee in the dark and you will break an ankle.

The water was still standing in the top half of the field when we quit. But it was moving now. You could see it. Every cut was running.

That night none of us could sleep much. My shoulders burned. Wes sat at the kitchen table with the field map and a pencil and figured how many more cuts the upper paddies needed.

About nine o’clock Glenda called the house. Wes’s mother.

Wes answered. I watched him listen. He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “No, ma’am, we’re all right,” and, “I know you didn’t, Mama. I know.”

When he hung up he sat a long time with his hand on the phone.

“She didn’t know,” he said. “She heard the well running this morning and thought he was finishing his late field. She just found out from Truman’s sister at choir practice.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked if the rice was going to make it.” He rubbed his face. “She asked me to forgive him. I told her I’d think about it.”

The second morning I was out at the field by a quarter to six. Wes was already there. He had not gone to the shop first. He had driven straight to the levee and sat in the truck with the window down waiting for light.

The new levee at the top had held overnight. That was the first good news. Dwight’s water was still running off his side, but it was all going down the turn row ditch now, and our field was not taking any more.

What was in our field was still there, though. The upper paddies had three or four inches standing in them, and some of the rice along the top had started to lean.

You could see it if you knew how to look. The stalks that had been standing straight were tipping, a few degrees at a time, the heads dragging lower. Another day like that and they would be flat.

So we went back to work. Truman came at seven with his plow. A woman from Glenda’s church, about sixty, came out with a cooler of ice and water and set it on the tailgate and drove off before I could thank her properly.

People had heard. That is how it is out here. Nobody said much, but people had heard.