 |
PatchWork
by
Joyce Whitis |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Flyin' in Cotton Patch
The sand was deep at
the end of the cotton rows so that’s where I decided to build my playhouse. I had already cleared the spot of dead leaves from
the Bois d’ arcs that bordered the field and picked up brittle twigs blown there when
the wind swept in from the north. Now I
broke off a healthy careless weed and swept the place where I wanted to put the highway.
Once I looked down the rows of dying cotton stalks and watched the bent backs of the bole
pullers moving along, dragging the long canvas sacks behind them. My dad, mother, brother, and sister were pulling
those sacks, trying to get in the last of the cotton while the weather was pretty. I
turned back to the miniature roads in the turning row, roads I had drawn with a dead
stick, and picked up my matchbox car loaded with fluffy cotton. Pulling the cotton loose from the seed had taken
quite awhile, especially since I had stopped to eat the yellow inside of every seed that I
collected from the lint. Now the cotton
fluffed up high and loose in the cardboard matchbox as I pulled the string attached to it
along the road that I had just made.
As I bent down to unload the cotton at the imaginary gin, a streak of brown darted
by the cotton wagon and disappeared in the fencerow.
Before the rabbit was clear of the weeds, his pursuer cleared the fence and I stood
up to watch as Beaver the Greyhound’s speed, brought an end to the chase. He came back in a few minutes, rabbit hanging
from his mouth, and trotted on past me, down the cotton middle to my brother. He dropped the rabbit in front of Austin and
waited, tongue dripping, sides heaving. Then
came his looked for reward, a pat on the head and the words, “Good boy, Beaver. You’re a good boy. Hey, hey look you all. Beaver caught another jackrabbit.”
After he showed everybody the rabbit, Beaver brought it back to the turning row and
flopped down by my playhouse to eat it. Since
I didn’t care about watching that, I moved under the trees and began to collect
apples from the Bois ‘d Arc trees. The
lumpy fruit scattered on both sides of the fence and I piled the apples against a dead
log. Just then everybody came to the wagon to
weigh in and I raced to the scales to watch. Dad
hooked the lop of wire on one corner of his sack to the bottom hook of the cotton scale,
hoisted the other end of the long sack clear of the ground and tied it around the hook. Balancing the largest pea on the iron arm of the
scale, he pulled out a stub of cedar pencil and a small spiral tablet from his overall bib
and wrote down 87 pounds by his name. He
weighed my mother’s sack while she took the top from a gallon jar wrapped in a wet
toe sack and drank the tepid water. Mother and my
sister sat down in the shade while Dad and my brother emptied the heavy sacks in the wagon
and “tromped” the cotton down. I
climbed up the sides of the wagon to help and Austin pretended to throw me off. Beaver finished his rabbit and ambled over to the
wagon. “Come on, boy, jump”, Austin
stopped ‘tromping’ the cotton and patted his chest. The Greyhound hesitated, muscles tensed and then
he sprung to the top of the cotton wagon, catching the edge of the sideboards with his
front feet and clawing his way up the rest of the way.
My brother and I hugged and petted him and those on the ground were
impressed with that jump. “I guess old
Beaver is the best dog in the country,” Austin said and we all agreed that he was.
Dad stood up and the others followed. “Well,
let’s just pull another round,” he said, stretching his back. “We’ll be through here before
sundown.”
“Hey, Daddy, I want to weigh.”
“O.K. come on.”
When he had hooked the empty sack to the cotton scale, Dad picked me up and set me
in the loop. He balanced the heavy weight on
the long arm of the scale and read aloud, “forty-five pounds. You’ve grown.”I followed the pickers to
the place where the long rows began and walked along the middle between my parents,
picking out the cotton and putting it in my mother’s sack. She told me stories as we moved along and I
noticed that my dad reached over every now and then and picked some from her row so she
could stay up with him. As we moved across the dry ground together, Mother began to sing
about the man who owned a mule that kicked so bad it destroyed the shay it was hitched to,
stopped a Texas railway train and kicked it out of sight.
This was a favorite song of mine and I sang it along with her as we moved through
the cotton patch. As the silly song ended, we heard the clear and far away call of
wild geese and everybody stopped and straightened aching backs while their eyes searched
the blue sky. My sister spotted them first
and began to shout. “There they are. There, just to the right of that little blue
cloud.” There they were indeed. A long ragged V, wings catching the sun, now and
then. Geese were moving along, calling as
they flew south. My heart was lifted in an
almost painful longing to rise from the sandy field and flapping my arms, join their
formation. I imagined how it would be to fly
with them to a place where the cold winds never blew and every day was sunshine.
I thought about it so hard that in the space of time it takes to think, I was up
there with them and looking down on the cotton fields, my family and the shocks of maize
across the fence. As I flew along I saw our
house, the mules standing in the lot eating bundles of feed, the cows walking toward the
barn, single file, chickens scratching the dirt in front f their house. And then I was
back on the ground, kneeling in the soft dirt, watching the geese fade from sight ad they
flew on to summer lands. When I looked back
at my family, they had left me there between the cotton stalks. They were picking far on down the rows, gathering
the last of the cotton, their words to each other lost to me. I walked back to the turn row and lay down under the
wagon, my head on Beaver who slept on, my eyes on the empty sky. My mother’s brother was Louis Gordon, the
flyer. He had flown Amelia Earhart across the
Atlantic that time when she was just a passenger, but I had never been up in an airplane. Neither had any of my family. I smiled knowing that someday I would fly but for
today I could do it in my head. I knew just
how it was done, lie back against Beaver and look at the sky and think….real hard. Pretty soon I felt myself take off, lighter than
air.
Just as the shadows from the trees lengthened across the cotton patch, I heard my
family coming toward the wagon. It was time
to weigh up and go home. Austin kicked my
bare foot where it lay stretched out, my head still on Beaver’s side.
“Where have you been, Squirt?”
“Flyin’ I said. “Just flyin’ everywhere.”