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Lizzie

Dallam County,Texas

1930

I spent the whole day plowing, and even ten minutes after I climbed down from the tractor, phantom vibrations ran through my hands as if I were still holding the steering wheel.

“It’ll rain now. Sure as anything,” Dad said. He and my brother, Henry, had been plowing another field with the horses earlier in the day, but horses tire quicker than tractors, so they’d taken them to rest in the barn and come to survey my work. “When you cultivate the soil, it exposes the moisture in the deep dirt to the sky. That’s what attracts the clouds. Rain follows the plow, sure as sunset follows the sunrise. You remember that, kids. It’s science you can trust.”

This was not the first time he’d dropped that kernel of wisdom, and me and my brother had been farming with our daddy since we first learned to walk, so we knew the theory as well as he did. We always plowed twice after harvest—first to pulverize the topsoil, to break the upper crust into small sods. After that, we’d go over the land with the disc harrows, a process that broke the little sods up completely—leaving the soil fine and silky, which Dad said gave the seeds room to grow. We bought the tractor brand-new after the bumper crop in 1929 and it made the whole process so much easier.

But that day, as I watched a dust haze settle back over the field, I felt a pang of anxiety. It usually rained in the autumn shortly after we plowed, just as Dad said. But it was supposed to rain during the spring and summer too, and that year, the clouds seemed to have forgotten how to work.

“I hope you’re right about the rain, Daddy,” I said cautiously. “It’s been awful dry lately.”

“Dry comes and goes.” Dad shrugged. “You’ll see that in life. Good, bad...exciting, boring. Life is all about the ebb and flow between those extremes, and sometimes, you just have to patiently ride it out.”

It was all well and good for Daddy to talk like that. His entire life was riding out the waves of his moods. Even when things were easier, before that dry year, Dad had good days and bad days, and it was me, Henry, and Mother who picked up the slack when he was down. I adored my dad, but he was so passive sometimes, he just about drove me crazy. Me and Henry exchanged a glance, and I knew my brother was thinking the same.

“Let’s head back to the house,” Dad said. “We have just enough time to go past the pond before sunset.”

I sighed as we all climbed up onto the tractor. This time, Dad was driving, and Henry and me sat on the little platform at the back, traveling backward.

“There’s going to be cows in the mud,” I said, leaning close to whisper in my brother’s ear. We farmed grain mostly, but we also kept a small herd of cows for meat and, when we could borrow a bull to breed them, calves to sell and milk to drink.

The cows lived in a narrow rectangle field adjacent to our yard, with a large pond at the edge. The water was almost gone from the pond after the dry year, leaving a wide band of stagnant mud around the edges. Even that was rapidly drying, but while it was still wet enough for a cow to sink into, it was dangerous as all hell.

At any other time we might have moved those cows to another field, but we needed to plow to prepare for sowing, which meant churning up what might have been feed. And there was no easy way to keep them out of that mud. Every day for over a week, we’d had to drag at least one cow free of it.

“There’s clean water right there,” Henry complained. We’d set up a brand-new trough for them against the fence, just a few dozen feet away. “Why the heck do those stupid cows keep getting stuck?”

“They’ve been drinking from that pond since they were born, that’s why,” I told him. “We need to face facts and sell them. We’ll run out of feed in that field sooner or later anyway.”

Not one but two cows were in the mud now—one in mud halfway up her legs, the other buried up past her shoulders and left weak from struggling all day.

Working together, me, Dad and Henry managed to push the first cow out of the shallow mud by hand. The other cow’s rescue operation was more complicated because she was too tired to help herself. Daddy looped some rope around her neck and tied it to the tractor, and I drove it slowly away from the pond’s edge, pulling her, while Henry and Dad stood in the mud and pushed her from behind.

We were all exhausted, filthy, and deflated by the time we finished—coated in a thick layer of mud that smelled so bad, it would stick to our skin for days.

“We should sell the cows,” I said.

Dad sighed impatiently. “It’ll rain any day and soon enough that pond will be full again. And anyway, the cows will eventually realize there’s an easy way to drink without risking their neck.”

“Well, the way things are going in this county, the price per head is sure to drop,” I said.

“Leave the business decisions up to me,” Dad said abruptly. “We’re not selling the damned cows.”

With that, he stomped back to the tractor and started off toward the barn without us. That was fine by me and Henry—the house was only a few hundred feet away.

“So in the meantime we just keep pulling the cows out of the mud every damned day?” I complained.

“They’ll have to learn to use the trough when the last of the water dries up.” Henry shrugged. Then his tone softened. “You need to stop assuming the worst all the time.”

I groaned and started walking toward the house.

“You’re as stubborn as the cows, Lizzie,” Henry called after me, chuckling. I ignored him, stomping all the way up to the house. I washed up as well as I could with cold water from the hand pump. As I was finishing, Mother brought me a towel.