The Wages I Counted at His Table

What Bridger Tried to Do

Bridger stood up so fast his cap fell off his knee onto the floor and he had to bend and get it, and when he came up his face was the color of the sweet tea.

“Bridger run a truck and scooped the cart and did every dirty job I handed him and never once griped,” I said. “Thirty-four days, counting the days he come out after ball practice. That’s thirty-two hundred dollars.”

I counted it into his hand, thirty-two hundreds, slow. His hand was shaking a little. When I set the last bill down he stood there holding it in both hands like it might blow away, and he did not say thank you. He looked at it, and then he looked at me, and his chin went.

“Garrett,” he said, real quiet, “can I say something.”

“Say it.”

He swallowed. “I heard. About your daddy not paying for this field.” He would not look at Lyle. He kept his eyes on me. “I know you cut nine hundred acres you ain’t getting paid for. And I know this money is coming out of your own pocket on account of it. And I just, it ain’t right I take full pay off a job that stiffed you. I’d feel better if you kept some back.”

And that boy peeled off six of the hundreds and held them out to me across the roast.

I want to tell you what six hundred dollars was to Bridger that summer. It was most of a month of his electric. It was the back half of his sister’s braces. It was a boy whose own daddy cannot work handing back money he had sweated thirty-four days for, because he did not think it was square, because somewhere along the way that kid had got the idea that you do not take money off a man who got cheated, even when the man owes it to you fair.

I did not take it. I folded his fingers back over the bills with both my hands, the way you close a gate you mean to stay shut.

“Bridger,” I said, “look at me. You earned every dollar of that in that truck. What my daddy does or does not do is not your account to settle. A man pays his crew. That is the whole of it. You take that home to your mama, and you do not say one word about where it came from. You hear me.”

His eyes were running over now and he was trying hard not to let it, scrubbing at his face with the back of his wrist. “Yes sir,” he said. “Thank you. I mean it. Thank you.”

He put his cap back on his head right there at the table, forgetting he was inside, and then remembered and snatched it off again, and the baby laughed, and it broke the thing open so the whole table could breathe.

Daddy had not said a word. He sat at the head of his own table with his hands flat on the cloth on either side of his plate, and he was looking at that seventeen-year-old boy, and his jaw was working like he had something in his teeth. I did not look at him long. I was not doing it to his face. I was just paying my boys.