So far we'd been lucky-the weather had been nearly perfect, and the crops looked good. That was their crop loan, and the money was spent on seed, fertilizer, labor, and other expenses. Pappy and my father had borrowed fourteen thousand dollars in March from the owner of the gin. I would finish all twelve grades and go play for the Cardinals. The two of us had already made a secret pact that I would never, under any circumstances, stay on the farm. My mother made sure I understood the numbers.

In fact, the math was so easy you wondered why anyone would want to be a farmer. A good crop could produce a bale an acre. A good gin produced perfect bales, ones that could be stacked like bricks.Ī bale of cotton was worth a hundred and seventy-five dollars, give or take, depending on the markets. It emerged at the other end in neat square bales covered in burlap and strapped tightly with one-inch steel bands. At one end of the gin the freshly picked cotton was sucked from the trailers through a long pipe, twelve inches around then it disappeared into the building where the machines worked on it.

I found a safe spot near the dock, where they wheeled out the finished bales and loaded them onto trailers headed for the Carolinas. He walked by a group of field hands waiting for their trailers without so much as a nod. I was scared of the machines, and when Pappy told me to wait outside, I was happy to do so. During each picking season, at least one worker would fall victim to some gruesome injury inside the cotton gin. The gin roared with the chorus of heavy machines at work. I waved again at the Montgomery twins as they were leaving, their trailer empty, headed home for another load. The gravel lot of the gin was crowded with cotton trailers, some empty, others waiting for their harvest to be ginned. Between six and eleven that morning, he'd picked two hundred pounds of cotton, yet he still walked so fast I had to jog to keep up. We walked to the Black Oak gin on the edge of town, a long walk-but Pappy did not believe in wasting gasoline. We parked again near Pop and Pearl's, and I followed him to the Tea Shoppe, where he argued with the man in charge of farm labor. Though he still drove the truck at its requisite speed, he was restless because the other fields along the road were getting picked, and ours were not. With the cotton waiting, my grandfather was not a patient man.

A painted house book