That Christmas Eve, Jaybird leaned on the porch rail, looking across Mississippi Delta cotton fields he had worked for seventy years. In moon-blanched stillness, the rich soil was taking its winter rest.
The old farmer had seen good and bad cotton harvests, but none like the one just finished. The rains had come, plenteous and timely. Summer’s days had been long, hot, and humid, and cotton’s green blood, chlorophyll, raced in a delirium of photosynthesis from sunlight to leaves to soil to fruit, loading the plants with bulging bolls that produced a yield to top all yields.
