The Crew We Paid at the Bin Trailer

Who Those Men Were

Abe’s crew was not a crew the way some people picture one. These were men we had eaten Thanksgiving leftovers with. Men whose kids Jory went to school with in Cashmere and Monitor.

Lester had a wife whose insulin came due on the first of every month, and the pharmacy in town did not take promises.

The young one had a baby girl born in August. His rent was due on the first, too.

The two brothers sent money home to their mother. Another man was building a house with his own hands on a lot out past Dryden, one wall at a time, paying as he went.

A week of bins was not a small thing to any of them. In our valley, pickers get paid by the bin.

That fall Spencer was paying $32 a bin, and a good man on a good block might fill five or six bins in a day.

Each bin is a wooden box about four feet square, and it holds roughly 900 pounds of apples when it is level full.

That is about 22 or 23 bags off a man’s chest, climbing up and down an orchard ladder all day.

So when I say $760 a man, I mean every apple in those bins was carried down a ladder by a man’s own two arms. I mean his back, his knees, and his week.

Why We Did Not Just Call Someone

People have asked me since why we did not just file a claim with the state, or call a lawyer, or go to the paper.

I understand why they ask. I asked it myself in the truck that night.

The answer is that the men did not want it. Lester said it plainly when Abe asked him.

He did not want his name in a court file. None of them did. Some of them had been treated badly by paperwork before.

And the money from a claim, if it came at all, would come in the spring.

Insulin does not wait until spring. A landlord does not wait until spring. A baby does not eat in the spring.

“I need it Monday,” the young one said, and he was not complaining.

He was just telling us the size of the problem. “I don’t need it right. I need it Monday.”