The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

The sun did the rest. It got up near ninety-five that afternoon, with a south wind, and you could almost see the mud dry. By evening it had a skin on it, cracked like an old plate.

Beckett came out after school again with the sharpshooter. He went straight to the top paddy and cut two more drains by himself. Wes did not watch him this time. He just let him go.

That night Wes walked the field one more time before dark with a flashlight, poking a stick in the mud along the tracks where the combine would run. He came back in and said, “Day after tomorrow, maybe. Maybe tomorrow afternoon if the wind keeps up.”

The third morning, the wind kept up.

I got to the field at six again, and the ground under my boots felt different. It was not soft.

It gave a little, the way a good garden gives, but it held. The cuts were running clear now, just a trickle, and the paddies were drained.

Wes was already on the combine. He had it fueled and greased and the header on, sitting at the bottom of the field on the turn row with the engine running.

“Are you sure?” I said.

He said, “No.” And then he put it in gear and drove it down into the bottom paddy.

I held my breath. It is a twenty-ton machine. If it sank, it would sink to the axles and we would need two tractors and a chain to get it out, and we would lose another day.

It did not sink. The tracks walked across that bottom paddy like it was a parking lot.

The header came down into the rice, and the reel started turning, and I heard that sound, that dry roar of rice going into a combine, and I sat down on the levee and cried.

Not much. A minute or two. Then I wiped my face and got up and went to see what I could do.

Truman came at seven. He did not have the levee plow this time.

He had driven his own pickup, and he climbed up on our tractor and hooked up our grain cart without asking anybody. He had pulled our cart before, years ago, when Wes’s daddy was alive.

That is how harvest works. The combine fills its tank as it cuts. The grain cart pulls alongside and takes the load while the combine keeps moving.

Then the cart runs the rice to the trucks waiting on the road, and they haul it to the dryer in town.

Here is the thing about our field. The only way from the top end of it to the county road runs along the line levee. Right past the old spill. Right below Dwight’s ground.

About nine o’clock the combine was working near the top of the field, and the cart was full, and Truman turned it toward the road.

And there was Dwight. Standing on his levee again, in the same place, with his arms folded.

I was on the levee with a shovel, fixing a cut that had washed too wide. I stopped and watched.

Truman came up the line levee in our tractor, pulling a thousand bushels of rice in that cart. He came right along below Dwight. He did not slow down and he did not speed up.

Dwight unfolded his arms. I saw him lift one hand, halfway, the way men out here lift two fingers off the steering wheel when they pass you on a gravel road.