The Last Day on the Potato Digger

What Arlo said

Bridger went red to his ears. The boys around him pushed him up out of his chair.

He walked up the length of that table with forty people watching him, in his faded green hoodie, with dust still in his hair because he would not take time to wash it.

Arlo put his hand on his shoulder.

“This boy,” Arlo said, “is the best picker I have had on a platform in about ten years. He never missed a day. He never came late. He never once complained, and some days that second digger was eating clods faster than three kids could pick them.”

The room clapped. Bridger looked at his shoes.

“And today,” Arlo said, “we had a new hand on the platform. Some of you saw her. She’s thirty-nine years old and drives your kids to school every morning, and she took a vacation day she’s been saving since spring to come stand in the dust on my digger for ten hours.”

He did not look at me. He looked at Lance.

“She stood right next to this boy from ten in the morning until dark. She didn’t take a long lunch and she didn’t sit in the truck. She picked clods until she couldn’t close her hands. I watched her from the pickup.”

My face was hot. I looked down at my plate. Kaylee reached over and squeezed my arm.

“She came to me Thursday night and asked me for one thing,” Arlo went on.

“Not a raise. Not a favor. She asked me to make her check out to her son. And his second week out to him too. And hand it to him myself.”

He held the envelope out to Bridger.

“So here it is. Both of them. Made out to you.”

Bridger took it. His hands were shaking a little.

Arlo was not done. He looked down the table again, and his voice got lower, so that you had to lean in to hear it.

“In 1974 I was fourteen years old and I worked my first harvest on this ground for my dad,” he said.

“When it was over he handed me my pay in an envelope and a note. That note said a man’s first pay belongs to him and nobody else. I’ve kept it fifty-two years.”

He looked right at Lance. Not mean. Just steady.

“I figured that was the kind of thing a boy ought to hear from a man. So I’m saying it. That money’s his. He earned it on my platform. Every cent.”

Nobody in that cellar said a word.