The Wages I Counted at His Table

The Handshake in May

I want to be fair to Daddy here, because a man who only tells the ugly part is a liar by leaving things out.

Lyle Tolliver is land rich and cash poor and has been my whole life. He owns ground his own father cleared and he would sooner cut off his hand than sell an acre of it. But ground you will not sell is not money in the bank. It is taxes and seed and diesel and a note at the co-op that gets carried from one crop to the next. Daddy has leaned on family to get the work done since before I could drive, and he has leaned hardest on me because I am the one who stayed.

I grew up driving his trucks for nothing. That is how it is on a farm and I am not crying about it. You work because it is your family’s living and someday some of it is yours. I drove the truck, I ran the auger, I walked beans, I did it for the roof over me and a pat on the shoulder that did not come often, and I did not mind, because that is what a boy does.

But I am thirty-four now. I have my own place, my own note, my own boys on the payroll who are counting on the money to be real. The summer I turned nineteen I started my crew with one wore-out combine and a dream, and Daddy told me I was a fool and would lose my shirt. I did not lose my shirt. I built the thing up one hard season at a time, and every man who has ever worked for me has been paid in full and on time, because I know down in my bones what it does to a working man to be told the money is not coming.

In May, on the phone, I gave my own father a customer’s rate and a customer’s handshake. I did not give him a discount and I did not ask for a favor. I treated him like a man who hires a job and pays for it. That is the respect I thought we had.

I was wrong, and I found out how wrong on a Thursday evening with the dust still in my throat.