The Day I Ran Our Old Tractor All Day

“Yes,” I said. “I believe he did.”

He nodded once and looked back at the water. “Does Daddy know?”

“Not yet.”

I called Boone at 7:05. He was at the mill in Yazoo City waiting on a load.

I told him plain: the aerators were gone, the drag marks went to his daddy’s, I was at one point one when I found them, and Thurman’s wheel was running.

There was a long silence. I heard a forklift backing up somewhere behind him, beeping.

“Are we losing fish?” he asked.

“Some. Along the bank. I don’t know how many yet.”

“I can’t leave this load.” His voice was tight and low. “If I walk off this truck they’ll give the route to somebody else, and then we can’t make the note anyway. I’ll be back by noon. Two at the latest.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve got it. Roscoe’s here.”

“Marnie.” He stopped. “Don’t go over there.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m sitting on this tractor.”

Now I need to tell you about Orrin, because if I just say he stole our aerators in a heat wave, you will picture a man with no heart, and that is not quite right.

It is worse than that, in a way. He had a heart. He just had it pointed at the wrong things.

Orrin Whitlock had raised catfish on that land for forty years. He started with one pond his daddy dug with a borrowed dragline in 1979, and he built it up to four, and he was proud of every levee on the place like he had poured them himself.

The summer before, he had lost his whole Pond Three on one hot still night in July.

A storm knocked the power out at the pole at midnight, his tractor wheel would not start, and by daylight there were 40,000 pounds of fish floating belly up.

I was there. I helped him and Nell rake them up with a skimmer for the rendering truck.

I had never seen Orrin cry before that day. He did not cry then, either, exactly. He just stood at the end of the levee with his hat in his hands and said, to nobody, “Never again. Not on my place. Never again.”

When Boone and I married, Orrin gave us the 12 acres to dig our pond on. That is the way he always told it at church dinners: “I gave them the land.”

What he did not say was that we paid him rent on it every December, and that we paid for the digging and the levees and two of the three aerators out of our own note at the bank.

The third aerator was an old one of his that he had let us have when we started. He had never asked for it back.

But in Orrin’s mind, I think, everything on Whitlock land was still his to move. The pond, the aerators, the boy, the boy’s wife. All of it lived on his ground.