The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table

“It’s not because he’s older,” I said. I was careful with my voice. “I don’t know yet why it is. But I’m going to find out, and you didn’t do anything wrong. You hear me? Not one thing.”

He nodded. He folded the check back up and put it in his pocket. He didn’t look as proud anymore, and that was the part I could not stand.

I should tell you how it began, because none of this came out of nowhere and Doug is not a monster. I want to be fair to him. I have been married to his little brother for sixteen years.

Doug Kramer runs two contract finishing barns on the home place outside of town, here in northwest Iowa where the land is flat enough to see a grain leg five miles off. He grows hogs for a big integrator. They own the pigs and the feed. Doug owns the buildings, the debt and the work.

Every time a group of pigs goes to market, the barn has to be emptied, soaked, washed down to the concrete, disinfected and dried before the next load of feeder pigs comes in. It is hot, loud, wet, miserable work, and it has to be done right or the next group gets sick.

Doug’s hired man quit in May. That’s when he called the house and asked Rob whether Ethan wanted a summer job alongside Bryce. Washing barns, mowing around the bins, painting, picking up, whatever needed doing.

Rob is a truck driver. Long haul this year, because the money was better and we were trying to put away enough for a new furnace before winter. He was home maybe four nights a month all summer. He took the call on his cell phone at a truck stop in Nebraska.

“Doug says he’ll take care of him,” Rob told me that night. “He says it’ll be good for Ethan to learn to work. He’ll settle up at the end of the summer.”

I asked what he was paying. Rob said he didn’t ask, and I didn’t push it. You don’t ask family for a number. That’s what I would have told you in May.

In Iowa a thirteen-year-old can work on a relative’s farm with his parents’ say-so. I looked it up anyway, because I am the kind of person who looks things up. I signed the paper Doug gave me, and I bought Ethan rubber boots and a pair of good earplugs.

Doug made sure the boys wore coveralls, safety glasses and a mask in the wash bay. I’ll give him that, and I’ll give it to him gladly. He never once let them near the pigs at load-out, and he never let them run the hot water washer without him there the first two weeks.

So all summer I drove Ethan out the four miles of gravel at a quarter to six, before my own shift. I’m a mechanic at the school district bus barn. Summers are when we tear down the fleet, brakes and wheel seals and whatever else the inspection is going to catch.