The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

“Her and her mother,” Merlyn said.

Fletcher whistled, low. “Forty acres.” He shook his head. “Well. It’s clean.” He shook Jaycee’s hand then, the way he had shaken Merlyn’s, and she shook it back without a word, standing as straight as I have ever seen her stand.

Then Fletcher went across the road to Darrin’s field.

We did not stay to watch. It would not have been right.

We went home, and Jaycee went out to feed her calves, and I sat at my kitchen table with my coffee for a long time and did not think about anything at all.

I heard about it that evening. Everybody did. Fletcher had walked Darrin’s eighty acres for most of the afternoon, and he had written it up. Too many tassels on the late plants.

Not enough to reject the field, but enough that the company was sending Darrin’s crew back through at his own cost, and docking his rate for the season.

It was the late tassels. The ones that come up after the first pass. The ones a fast crew walks right past.

Darrin’s whole crew was back in that field on Tuesday morning, starting at the north end, working it all over again. We could hear his radio across the road. It was not playing loud.

I want to be honest about how I felt when I heard. I did not feel glad.

I thought about it, and I would have liked to feel glad, but what I felt was mostly tired, and a little sorry for Lula, who I like, and for his kids, who had to go back in.

I did not say anything to anybody about it. When Zelda asked me at the farm store, I said, “Merlyn’s field passed,” and that was all I said. That was the only part that was mine to say.

The next day was our last. There was nothing left to pull in Merlyn’s field, but he asked us to come out at noon anyway.

He said he had something for Jaycee, and that he did not want to give it to her in a kitchen.

So we drove out at noon, just like every other day, and there was Merlyn on his tailgate with his red cooler. Bertram was there in his straw hat, with his thermos.

Zelda was there, on her lunch hour from the farm store. Nolan had taken his dinner break early and come out from the elevator.

Merlyn opened the cooler and held out a grape Popsicle to Jaycee and an orange one to me, the same as every day.

Then he reached in his shirt pocket and took out an envelope and held that out too.

“Eighteen mornings,” he said. “A hundred and twenty hours, at fifteen dollars. It’s all wrote down in there. You can check my arithmetic.” He nodded at me. “Your mother does my books. She’ll tell you I’m bad at arithmetic.”

Jaycee took the envelope in her taped fingers and opened it. There was a check inside for eighteen hundred dollars, and a sheet of paper from his spiral notebook with every morning written down in his slow, square handwriting, the hours, and her name at the top.