Neighbors harvest farmer's last crop

At first glance, it was just another day on the farm: fields stretched almost as far as the eye can see in two directions, and the brown, spindly branches of cotton plants were dotted white with bolls ready to harvest.

Some of the 20 men gathered finished their lunch and prepared to climb back aboard the cotton pickers and tractors pulling boll buggies, while others headed out to man the module builders, which shape the loose, picked cotton into giant stacks that will later be picked up by workers from the nearby cotton co-op for processing.

It’s work the men do every day on their own farms, but there was a quiet undercurrent of sadness because it was no ordinary day — a fellow farmer, a man most of them have known their entire lives, was to be buried the next day.

The farm the men were working belonged to William “Van” Kuykendall, 52, who died earlier this month after a brief illness. Before these men say goodbye to their friend, they worked to bring in Kuykendall’s last crop, to help his family and to honor him.

“It sort of organized itself,” Roy Newsom, who knew Kuykendall for 35 years, said of the effort.

The farmers began work at 10 a.m. and worked until dark to pick Kuykendall’s 320 acres of cotton. There were four teams of pickers out at lunchtime, and more were expected to come later in the day, after they finished harvesting their own crops. The Delta Cotton Co-op provided lunch for the workers.

“Today was a good day, and if we have a good day tomorrow, we’ll finish up,” Newsom said.

Marmaduke is a small and close-knit community. When word spread that Kuykendall had died, there was no organized effort to help — the response was automatic, Cliff Carter said.

“You didn’t have to tell anyone what to do, you just go to work,” he said.

Kuykendall’s friends described him as “good people.”

“He was the type that, whatever he said, that’s the way it was. He would try his best to tell the truth,” Newsom said, his grief at losing his friend evident. “He was a caring person, he tried to take care of his parents, his family.”

“Van was as good as they get,” Carter said.

Earl Parrish said he had no doubt that Kuykendall would have done the same for him. “Everybody just pulls together” in times of trouble, he said.

“This is what we do,” Carter said. “When a neighbor’s in need, we do what we can. There’s not a better community than Marmaduke, Arkansas.”