The Crew We Paid at the Bin Trailer

The Afternoon

By two o’clock it was a bright October afternoon, the kind that only comes at the very end of the season.

The sky was clean blue, and the hills behind us had gone all the way brown.

I was up on my ladder reaching for a high red apple when I looked down the row.

Abe was carrying a full bag to the bins on the trailer at the end. His black beard had leaves in it. His tan cap was dark with sweat.

He looked up and saw me watching him and lifted his chin. That was all. Fourteen years married and that chin lift still does something to me.

I counted the bins from my ladder. Jory had been calling them out all day from the trailer, loud enough for the whole orchard to hear. “Thirty-one!” Then “Thirty-two!” The men cheered every one like a touchdown.

At three-thirty, Jory yelled, “Forty!” and then just stood there on the trailer with his arms up, like he did not know what else to do with them.

Mavis

Mavis’s truck came up our lane at five minutes to four, a big flatbed with side rails.

Ione loaded it with her forks, two bins at a time, and Mavis walked the stack with a clipboard looking into every one.

She dug her hand into a few bins and turned apples over.

She found a handful of bruises and two bins with too much small fruit, and she said so. Then she wrote a number at the bottom of her sheet.

“Forty bins, two docked a little for size,” she said. “I’ll call it $8,750.”

She counted it out in hundreds and fifties on the hood of my truck, and I counted it back.

Then I handed the whole stack to Abe, because it was his crew and his book.

The Trailer

Abe sat on the edge of the bin trailer with the green book open on his knee.

I sat beside him with the money and a box of envelopes from the house. Jory stood on the trailer behind us and read the names out loud.

“Lester,” Jory called.

Abe ran his finger down the page. “Seven hundred sixty-eight,” he said. I counted it into an envelope and wrote Lester’s name on the front, and Abe handed it to him.

Lester took it in both hands. He did not open it. He just stood there for a second, nodded once, and stepped back.

One by one, Jory called the men. One by one, Abe found the number in his book.

Some were a little more than $760 and some a little less, because some men are faster on the ladder. Every number came from the book, not from me.

The young one with the baby girl had tears on his face when he took his envelope, and he wiped them on his sleeve and laughed at himself.

One of the brothers shook Jory’s hand like Jory was a grown man.

When it was done, there was $350 left over in my hand. I tried to give it to Ione for her fuel.

She looked at me like I had insulted her mother, so I put it in my pocket.