The Crew We Paid at the Bin Trailer

Saturday

They came at first light, every one of them. Eleven men in the yard, breath smoking in the cold, ladders over their shoulders.

Lester brought his wife’s coffee in a big steel thermos and set it on my porch rail.

Abe stood in front of them and explained it in three sentences. Pick the 40 bins.

Mavis pays cash at four. Every man gets what his check was short, from the book.

Lester stepped forward. “We’ll pick it,” he said. “But we don’t take a dollar for today. You understand me, Abe? Today’s free. You pay us what he kept. Not one cent more.”

Abe started to argue, and Lester just shook his head. The other men nodded behind him. That was the end of that.

We had 13 people on six acres. Eleven pickers, Abe, and me. Jory made 14, though he was not allowed on a ladder.

His job was running empty bags and counting bins on the trailer, and he took it more seriously than school.

Abe had pulled our flatbed bin trailer to the end of the first row the night before and loaded it with empty bins from our shed.

It held four bins at a time. Every time it filled, he ran it down to the yard with the little tractor and came back.

The Work

If you have never picked apples, I will tell you how it goes. You strap the canvas bag on your chest like a big apron.

You climb the ladder with both hands free. You pick with the whole hand, palm up, and roll the apple off the spur so the stem stays on.

You never pull. You never drop one into the bag. You set it in.

A bruise on a Gala shows by Monday, and a bruised bin is a cull bin, and a cull bin is worth almost nothing.

When the bag is full, around 40 pounds, you climb down and walk it to the bin.

You lower the bag inside, unhook the bottom flap, and let the apples roll out gently. Then you hook it back and go up again.

You do that 22 or 23 times, and you have filled one bin. You do it all day.

The men on Abe’s crew could do it half asleep, and they still looked at every apple.

I picked all day in my red flannel and Abe’s old gray quilted vest.

I tied my hair up in a high ponytail to keep it out of the branches. By ten o’clock my shoulders burned like they were on fire.

I had not picked a full day since Jory was born. The men noticed.

Lester came down my row once and moved my ladder for me without a word, setting the legs into the slope so the ladder would not rock.

Ione

Around eleven, Ione Haugen came up our lane on her old green tractor with the bin forks on the front.

She was 67 and had run the orchard on the other side of us alone since her husband passed.

Ione did not ask what was going on. Somebody at church must have called her.

She just pulled up by the bins in the yard, set her brake, and said, “Where do you want these stacked for the truck, Abe?”

She had a pan of cinnamon rolls on the tractor seat beside her, wrapped in a dish towel.

She handed it to Jory and told him to make sure every man got two.

Then she stayed. She ran her forks all afternoon, stacking full bins three high by the lane so Mavis’s truck could load fast.

She never once asked why our crop was coming off with somebody else’s crew on it.

At noon we ate on the bins. Ione’s rolls, Lester’s wife’s coffee, a cooler of baloney sandwiches I had made at six that morning.

Nobody talked about Spencer. The men talked about the World Series and whose truck was making what noise.

Lester hummed while he picked in the afternoon. It was an old hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River,” and he did not know all the words, so he hummed the parts he did not know. Some of the other men hummed with him.