At ten minutes after six that morning I was standing at the end of my melon rows with a thermos of coffee, waiting on eight pickers who were never going to come.
The sun was already up over the tree line along the river, and the dew was heavy on the vines. You could smell the melons.
If you have ever stood in a ripe watermelon field in late July, you know that smell, sweet and green and a little like cut grass.
My first semi load of the year was booked for that day. The buyer had called it in on Monday.
Nadine Oakes would back her trailer onto my field road at eight, and she would pull out at two o’clock, loaded or empty.
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I had thirty acres of melons on the sandy ground south of Vincennes, along a county blacktop.
I got that ground and my folks’ old farmhouse on it in the divorce. Dwayne got the home place across the road and the equipment shed and most of everything else.
We had grown melons together for twenty years. Knox County is melon country, and the sand along the Wabash grows them sweet.
We planted in late April on black plastic with drip tape under it, and by late July the whole field was ready at once.
When we split, we made one agreement that I thought would hold. Dwayne held the contract on the picking crew, eight men who had worked for us for years.
They would pick his ground and mine, and I would pay them for the hours on mine.
It had worked through the spring. They had laid my plastic and set my transplants in April.
They had hoed my rows in June. I paid them every Friday, sixteen dollars an hour, same as Dwayne did.
At six thirty I called Dwayne. He picked up on the fourth ring, and I could hear a truck engine running behind him and men talking in the background.
“Where is the crew,” I said. “Nadine is backing in at eight. I told you that on Monday, and I told you again on Wednesday.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “I sent them over to Tammy’s patch. Her melons are going soft on her. She lost half a row yesterday, and she sat in the truck and cried about it.”
Tammy was his new wife. She had planted three acres that spring, her first patch ever, on ground Dwayne rented from her uncle up near Oaktown. I had nothing against her, and I still do not.
“Dwayne,” I said. “I have a semi coming. That is my first load. That is the load that tells the buyer whether I can do this on my own.”
“I know it,” he said. “I will send them over tomorrow. Call the buyer and push it back a day. He will understand. It is just one day.”
I stood there holding the phone. A day is nothing to a man who is not the one losing it.
A buyer who books a truck has a warehouse waiting on the other end, and a grocery chain waiting on the warehouse.