Two men from the men’s breakfast at church came out around eight with their own shovels. One of them had been my high school ag teacher. I did not ask them to come. They just walked out the levees and asked Wes where to dig.
By nine there were seven of us in the field, plus Truman on the tractor. The cuts went fast with that many hands. We worked our way up the field, levee by levee, opening every low spot.
About ten o’clock I looked up from my cut and saw Dwight.
He was standing on top of his line levee, up at the corner by the old spill, with his arms folded. He was just standing there in the sun looking down at us.
I do not know how long he had been there. Nobody had said anything. I think the men had seen him and decided not to look up.
Wes saw him the same time I did. He put his shovel in the mud, standing up, and he walked up the levee toward the top of the field. I went after him. I did not want him going up there alone.
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He stopped on our side of the new levee. Dwight stood on his side. There was maybe twenty feet of water and clay between them.
Dwight is not a big man, but he is solid, and he has the kind of face that does not show much. He looked at the new levee Truman had thrown up, and he looked at the cuts, and he looked at Wes.
Wes said, “Put your boards back in, Dwight. Put them in, and we’re done talking about it.”
His voice was calm. I have heard him talk to a cow stuck in a fence that same way.
Dwight did not move. He said, “A field that low ought to belong to somebody who can keep it dry.”
I felt my face go hot. Wes did not move either.
“This field was dry,” Wes said. “It was dry two days ago. You made it wet.”
Dwight said, “Your daddy would have sold it to keep the place together.”
That was the only time I saw Wes’s hands close. Then they opened again.
“My daddy,” he said, “would have run you off this levee with that sharpshooter.” He took a breath. “But I’m not him. So I’m asking you one more time. Put your boards back.”
Dwight looked at him a long while. I could hear the blackbirds in the rice. I could hear Truman’s tractor idling down the field.
Then Dwight turned around and walked back up his levee toward his house. The boards stayed where they were, stacked in the grass.
Wes stood there until he was out of sight. Then he turned and walked back down to his cut and picked up his shovel and went back to digging.
He did not say a word about it the rest of the day. Not to me, not to Truman, not to anybody.
By that afternoon every levee in the field had at least two cuts. The water was off the lower half entirely.
The top paddies were down to an inch or so, puddles more than a flood, and the ground was showing through in the high spots.