The Crew We Paid at the Bin Trailer

The checks came out of a manila envelope at four o’clock on the last Friday of harvest.

Spencer Wenzel handed them out himself, standing at the end of a Fuji row with the sun low over the brown hills.

Abe’s men took them the way they always did, with a nod and a thank you. They were tired.

Nine weeks of ladders and bags will do that to a man, and they had one more week to go.

I was there because I had driven over after my afternoon bus route with a cooler of pop, the way I did every payday.

Our son Jory, who was 12, was sitting on my tailgate eating sunflower seeds.

Lester opened his check first. He was 64 and had picked under my husband for 16 years, since the first season Abe ran the crew.

He looked at it, then looked at it again, and then held it out to Abe.

“Abe,” he said quietly. “This is short.”

My husband took it and read it. I watched his jaw set under his black beard.

Then one of the brothers from Cashmere opened his, and then the young one with the new baby, and then all of them.

Every check was short. Not by a few dollars. By about a week of bins.

When Abe added it up later on the hood of my truck, it came to $8,400 across 11 men.

“Spencer,” Abe said. “These are wrong.”

Spencer did not even look down at the checks. He was 50 that year, a big man in a clean canvas coat, and he had a way of looking past you at something more important.

“Bin counts were off,” he said. “The checker’s tickets don’t match the trailer. I paid what I can stand behind. They can take it or leave it.”

The Tally Book

What Spencer did not seem to remember was the tally book. My husband had kept one every season since he made foreman at 25, a little green ledger that rode in his shirt pocket from August to November.

Every bin, every man, every day. The checker punched the cards, and Abe wrote it down again at the end of each row in pencil, because his grandfather had taught him that two counts are better than one.

Abe took it out right there and opened it on the hood. “Lester, 31 bins last week,” he said.

“Your check pays 7. That’s not a count being off. That’s a week gone.”

Spencer looked at the green book the way you look at a dog that has gotten into the garbage.

“I’m not standing out here doing arithmetic with you, Abe. You want to argue it, argue it in January.”

Then he got in his pickup and drove down the orchard road toward his shop, and the dust hung there in the low light behind him for a long time.

I want to say something here about my husband, because people who hear this story always ask where he was.

He was right there. He was standing in the dust with 11 short checks in his hand and his own check in his pocket.

His own check was whole. Spencer had paid his foreman every penny. I think that was on purpose.

I think Spencer believed that if Abe was paid, Abe would go quiet. He did not know his cousin very well.