BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

BEAR POPLAR — Peggy Cress thought she understood Thanksgiving.

She knew it was turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce and being thankful everybody was healthy, even the cows when she and Mitchell were dairy farmers and, after they changed from cows to cotton, being thankful that the crop was just about in.

She knew it was important to thank God all the time for all your blessings, not just on Thanksgiving, but giving it a special emphasis on that special day.

Until now.

Now she knows she didn’t understand just how thankful you can really be until Monday, Oct. 29, and forever more her Thanksgiving Days will be a little different.

At 6 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 29, Mitchell got up and went to the bathroom and came back to bed to catch that little extra 30-minute snooze.

“Did you sleep good?” she asked their routine morning question as she closed her eyes again.

“Yes,” he said, and turned over.

But that was the end of routine.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “I’m sick.”

He sat up, thought he might throw up but didn’t, murmured something about everything going around, and the thought ran through Peggy’s mind that maybe he had vertigo. She’d had vertigo once, and the thought ran through her mind that, goodness, you can’t pick cotton with vertigo, but he lay back down. Almost instantly, though, he was up again.

“I saw beads of sweat the size of my little finger on his shoulders,” she says, and he said his hands were going numb.

Was he having a stroke?

She reached for the phone.

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Kenny Goforth, a first responder and a Mt. Ulla neighbor, was there in minutes. Mitchell needed oxygen, but he was conscious until they got to the emergency room at Davis Hospital in Statesville.

It took about 10 minutes to run a test that determined whether or not he was having a stroke.

He wasn’t. More likely, the doctor said, it was an aneurism in his brain. Not the usual balloon, but a thin piece of tissue that had probably been there since birth.

He had to be airlifted immediately to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem and he was in a coma.

“If he was your daddy,” his daughter, Malynda, asked the doctor on the telephone later that day, “how would you respond?”

“I’d say, ‘Call in the family,’ ” the doctor said. He didn’t expect her dad to make it to Winston-Salem.

Their son, Carmon, and his wife, Annette, were in Idaho. Malynda was in New York.

So Peggy called her good friend and neighbor, Sally Murphy, from the waiting room in Statesville when she found out that Mitchell had to go to Baptist.

“I’ll need you all day,” she said.

Like a fairy godmother, Sally appeared instantly, whisked her to Baptist Hospital and stayed with her until the children got there that night.

And the days began to blur.

“Miraculously,” Peggy says, “he came out of the coma, and it looked like he recognized the children. He smiled and nodded his head. It was just long enough to satisfy them.”

But then spasms in the arteries began, and he went back into a coma again. They lost count of the surgeries and the days.

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“When I was sitting there in Statesville, waiting for Sally to come,” Peggy says, she thought about the cotton.

“I realized we had our livelihood — for the year — not quite half in yet.”

They’d planted about 400 acres in cotton — just the two of them.

“We work together in the cotton patch,” she says, and have since they switched from dairy cows to cotton six years ago.

They’d harvested about half, close to 200 acres, but they had about 200 more to go — and harvesting cotton is more than picking and getting it to the gin.

You have to get the small grain seed sowed and mow the cotton stalks so they fall over the seeds and give them some protection until it rains to they’ll germinate and come up and the ground won’t erode. Federal rules require that.

They were doing it all and expected to be back at it that Monday morning.

“We had the best picking day in our life on Saturday before this happened,” she says. “The picker was running so well, and the cotton was so productive this year. It’s the best crop we ever had. The cotton bolls just looked like roses. We hadn’t had any rain on it to cause it to look droopy. The stalks had made three to four bolls on one end looking up at you like roses.

“I sat there thinking, ‘How will I do it? It’ll have to be after everybody else has picked theirs.’ ”

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But it didn’t have to be.

The next morning word was spreading that Mitchell was in a coma at Baptist Hospital.

Charlie Hamby and his son, Paul, were at Steele Seed & Feed at Bear Poplar, and Paul went over to his daddy.

“We better go by and see if Peggy needs any help to pick her cotton,” he said.

When they got there, Debra Cress and Angie Graham were at the Cress house.

Debra was gathering up some things Peggy needed and getting ready to take her car to the hospital.

Angie was feeding the pets, the new kitten, Boots, and their old border collie, Tippie, who doesn’t understand what’s happened and isn’t wagging her tail much. Mostly she just walks around with her head down and doesn’t want to eat.

Charlie and Paul drove up to the back door, and Debra came out.

“We’re here to pick cotton,” Paul said.

And that was the beginning.

By the next day men and machines were there, picking, dumping the cotton into the module packer, protecting the big 15-bale modules that go to the gin with big plastic tarps, sowing barley and bush-hogging the fields to allow the seeds to germinate and prevent erosion.

Sometimes only the sound of one tractor cut the afternoon stillness.

“Sometimes, there are three or four tractors in the field,” says Faye Carter, “doing what we ought to be doing for people all the time. Evidently Mitchell’s done a lot for a lot of people, because a lot of people are doing for him.”

And not just in the afternoons. Nights and Sundays, too.

“They finished every night in the dark,” says Debra Cress, Peggy and Mitchell’s ex-daughter-in-law who lives on the other side of their farm on Highway 801 and still feels like a daughter. She’s been the telephone contact and No. 1 go-fer in the Bear Poplar-Mt. Ulla community effort to get the Cress crop in.

“They pick until there’s so much moisture they can’t do any more,” she says. “The night that they finished up last week, I had finished doing everything I could, and I went to the back door and looked out, and it looked like a UFO had landed in the cotton field there were so many lights. They had a cotton picker, a tractor and a truck out there, all with lights on.”

She expected Sunday work to present a little problem.

“Peggy and Mitchell are real good Christian people,” she says, and they don’t believe in work on Sundays. Of course, they had to milk and feed the cows when they were in the dairy business, but they always got to church and kept work to a minimum. Now that they’re cotton farmers, they don’t work on Sundays.

So she called Peggy at the hospital.

“You and the Lord got to have a nice long talk,” Debra said.

“What about?” Peggy asked. “Me and the Lord have been talking pretty regularly.”

“Well,” Debra said, “you’re not supposed to work on Sundays unless your ox is in the ditch. Has your ox ever been deeper in the ditch than it is now?”

If Peggy had asked, Debra could have given her chapter and verse. Luke 14:5 asks, “Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit and will not straight away pull him out on the Sabbath day?”

“You and the Lord,” Debra said, “have to decide if these men can pick on Sunday.”

Peggy, she says, did a lot of praying and talked to her preacher.

“And her preacher said it would be all right. Her ox is about as deep in the ditch as it can get. So she let ’em pick on Sunday.”

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Charlie Hamby, a retired cotton farmer, was there, of course, supervising and running the module packer. His son, Paul, was picking — and putting the fire out when something went wrong in the engine of the picker.

David Hall, who normally sells farm equipment but farms a little on the side, was spreading seed. Wayne Kluttz, who works for a Caterpillar dealership in Charlotte, was mowing. David Lentz, a farm equipment mechanic as well as a farmer, was running the boll wagon, which takes cotton from the picker to the module, saving time so the picker could keep going.

And they passed the jobs around so they could keep going.

When Paul needed to go for lunch or fix a piece of equipment, David ran the picker, and Ben Knox, soil technician with the N.C. Department of Agriculture, took his place on the boll wagon.

Jamey Brown, a water technician in Mooresville and a farmer, was mowing in another field with another tractor.

Norman Correll, a good friend and next door neighbor, was chief cheerleader driving his grandsons, Joseph and Justin Martin, around on his golf cart so they could see what was going on.

“Mitchell,” one of them said, “is an honest man with a love for the Lord and a love for the land.”

And farmers, they agreed, come together as a community. Farmers look after farmers.

“It was absolutely unreal,” Debra says. “Every time you saw somebody, they wanted to know what they could do.”

And somebody was there, starting each day about noon when they were sure the dew was off the cotton, doing what they knew how to do and learning what they didn’t know so they could help.

Debra marked the cotton modules and called them into the cotton gin so they’d be insured. John Steele at Steele Feed & Seed looked after getting people to seed the cover crop and to bush hog, “and people,” she says, “just kept coming ... ” 

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By the time they finished the whole crop on Wednesday a week ago at 8 p.m., the list was long. Mitchell, a 67-year-old man who could keep up with any 40-year-old until that Monday morning, had helped plenty of people through the years.

Now people were helping him.

Some — Sally Murphy, Faye Carter, Nell Winecoff, the granddaughters, Tonya Kepley and Angie Cress — did the personal things, fed the pets, ran errands, cleaned the house, winterized the camper, handled business.

Taking care of the cotton were the Hambys, David Lentz, Steve Campbell, David Morrow, Ted Luther, Ben Luther, Robert Knox, Robert Knox II, Wayne Kluttz, David Hall, Clark Knox, Marvin Cress, John Steele, Sandy Brown, Jamey Brown, E.K. Graham, Bob Weast, Ben Knox, Richard Graham and Jim Hall.

And a lot of them brought equipment, including Wayne Kluttz, Ted Luther, Sandy Brown, Robert Knox, Steve Campbell, David Hall, Johnny Moore and the Burlesons, Ronnie, Dennis and Andrew.

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Did Mitchell know what was happening?

Did he have to come out of the coma so he could tell them thank you?

One day when his granddaughter, Angie, tickled his foot and told him to move it, he did.

The next day he squeezed a hand.

And by the end of last week, he was off the respirator and the shunt was out of his head and doctors had licked pneumonia and a staph infection and he was fever free, and Peggy couldn’t stop giggling when he puckered up.

“I found out,” she says, “that if I smootch up on him, his eyes open, and today he puckered up, and he had the tiniest little smile and his eyes lit up ...

“I came out of the ICU, praising the Lord out loud, and a man from the Linwood community heard me, and said, ‘Well, yours must have been a good visit,’ and I said, ‘Yes, can’t you tell?’ ”

And she told him that she’d sneaked a little kiss and Mitchell had puckered up, and he went back into his wife and came back later and said, “Guess what? She puckered up, too.”

And today on Thanksgiving Day?

Oh, Peggy Cress knows now they’re all Thanksgiving Days for the Cress family, who will keep on giving thanks every day for all those giving friends — and for Mitchell’s life.

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .