The cotton itself looked pitiful. The bolls sagged from the weight of the rainfall. The stalks were bent from the wind. A week of blazing sunshine might dry the ground and the cotton and allow us to finish picking, but such weather was long gone.
We turned north and crept along an even soggier trail, the same one Tally and I had walked a few times. The creek was just ahead.
I stood slightly behind Pappy, clutching the umbrella stand and the brace above the left rear tire, and I watched the side of his face. His jaws were clenched, his eyes were narrowed. Other than the occasional flare of temper, he was not one to show emotion. I’d never seen him cry or even come close. He worried because he was a farmer, but he did not complain. If the rains washed away our crops, then there was a reason for it. God would protect us and provide for us through good years and bad. As Baptists we believed God was in control of everything.
I was certain there was a reason the Cardinals lost the pennant, but I couldn’t understand why God was behind it. Why would God allow two teams from New York to play in the World Series? It completely baffled me.
The water was suddenly deeper in front of us, six inches up the front tires. The trail was flooded, and for a moment I was puzzled by this. We were near the creek. Pappy stopped the tractor and pointed. “It’s over the banks,” he said matter-of-factly, but there was defeat in his voice. The water was coming through a thicket that once sat high above the creek bed. Somewhere down there Tally had bathed in a cool, clear stream that had disappeared.
“It’s flooding,” he said. He turned off the tractor, and we listened to the sounds of the current as it came over the sides of Siler’s Creek and ran onto the bottomland that was our lower forty acres. It got lost between the rows of cotton as it crept down the slight valley. It would stop somewhere in the middle of the field, about halfway to our house, at a point where the land began a gentle slope upward. There it would gather and gain depth before spreading east and west and covering most of our acreage.
I was finally seeing a flood. There had been others but I’d been too young to remember them. All of my young life I’d heard tall tales of rivers out of control and crops submerged, and now I was witnessing it for myself, as if for the first time. It was frightening because once it started no one knew when it would end. Nothing held the water; it ran wherever it wanted. Would it reach our house? Would the St. Francis spill over and wipe out everyone? Would it rain for forty days and forty nights and cause us to perish like the ones who’d laughed at Noah?
Probably not. There was something in that story about the rainbow as God’s promise to never again flood the earth.
It was certainly flooding now. The sight of a rainbow was almost a holy event in our lives, but we hadn’t seen one in weeks. I didn’t understand how God could allow such things to happen.
Pappy had been to the creek at least three times during the day, watching and waiting and probably praying.
“When did it start?” I asked.
“I reckon an hour ago. Don’t know for sure.”
I wanted to ask when it would stop, but I already knew the answer.
“It’s backwater,” he said. “The St. Francis is too full, there’s no place for it to go.”
We watched it for a long time. It poured forth and came toward us, rising a few inches on the front tires. After a while I was anxious to head back. Pappy, however, was not. His worries and fears were being confirmed, and he was mesmerized by what he was seeing.
In late March, he and my father had begun plowing the fields, turning over the soil, burying the stalks and roots and leaves from the previous crop. They were happy then, pleased to be outdoors after a long hibernation. They watched the weather and studied the almanac, and they had begun hanging around the Co-op to hear what the other farmers were saying. They planted in early May if the weather was right. May 15 was an absolute deadline for putting the cotton seeds in the ground. My contribution to the operation began in early June, when school was out and weeds began sprouting. They gave me a hoe, pointed me in the right direction, and for many hours a day I chopped cotton, a task almost as hard and mind-numbing as picking the stuff. All summer as the cotton and the weeds around it grew, we chopped. If the cotton bloomed by July 4, then it was going to be a bumper crop. By late August we were ready to pick. By early September we were searching for hill people and trying to line up some Mexicans.
And now, in mid-October, we were watching it get swept away. All the labor, the sweat and sore muscles, all the money invested in seed and fertilizer and fuel, all the hopes and plans, everything was now being lost to the backwaters of the St. Francis River.
We waited, but the flood did not stop. In fact the front tires of the tractor were half-covered with water when Pappy at last started the engine. There was barely enough light to see. The trail was covered with water, and at the rate the flood was spreading we’d lose the lower forty by sunrise.
I had never witnessed such silence over supper. Not even Gran could find anything pleasant to say. I played with my butter beans and tried to imagine what my parents were thinking. My father was probably worried about the crop loan, a debt that would now be impossible to repay. My mother was working on her escape from the cotton patch. She was not nearly as disappointed as the other three adults. A disastrous harvest, following such a promising spring and summer, gave her an arsenal of artillery to use against my father.
The flood kept my mind off heavier matters — Hank, Tally, Cowboy — and for this reason it was not an unpleasant subject to think about. But I said nothing.
School would reopen soon, and my mother decided I should begin a nightly routine of reading and writing. I was longing for the classroom, something I would never admit, and so I enjoyed the homework. She commented on how rusty my cursive writing had become and declared that I needed a lot of practice. My reading wasn’t too smooth either.
“See what pickin’ cotton’ll do to you?” I said.
We were alone in Ricky’s room, reading to each other before I went to bed. “I have a secret for you,” she whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”
If you only knew, I thought. “Sure.”
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“You can’t tell anybody, not even Pappy and Gran.”
“Okay, what is it?”
She leaned even closer. “Your father and I are thinkin’ about goin’ up North.”
“What about me?”
“You’re goin’, too.”
That was a relief. “You mean to work like Jimmy Dale?”
“That’s right. Your father has talked to Jimmy Dale, and he can get him a job at the Buick plant in Flint, Michigan. There’s good money up there. We’re not stayin’ forever, but your father needs to find somethin’ steady.”
“What about Pappy and Gran?”
“Oh, they’ll never leave here.”
“Will they keep farmin’?”
“I suppose. Don’t know what else they’d do.”
“How can they farm without us?”
“They’ll manage. Listen, Luke, we can’t sit here year after year losin’ money while we borrow more. Your father and I are ready to try somethin’ else.”
I had mixed emotions about this. I wanted my parents to be happy, and my mother would never be content on a farm, especially when forced to live with her in-laws. I certainly didn’t want to be a farmer, but then my future was already secure with the Cardinals. But the thought of leaving the only place I’d ever lived was unsettling. And I couldn’t imagine life without Pappy and Gran.