The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

I fed those four boys supper that night. My mother cut the watermelon from the refrigerator into big red half moons, and they ate the whole thing standing on the back porch, juice running down their chins, the way boys do.

Amos ate three pieces after swearing he would never eat watermelon again. Isaiah asked my mother for her ham salad recipe for his own mother.

The juniors fell asleep on the porch swing before the sun was down.

Bryce sat on the porch steps with his elbows on his knees and looked out at the field.

I sat down next to him. I did not say anything for a while, and neither did he.

“I dropped the first one,” he said finally.

“You did,” I said. “And then you caught about twenty three hundred more.”

He thought about that. Then he smiled, just a little, the way he does when he does not want anybody to see it. “Some of those went to Dad,” he said.

I put my arm around him. He let me, which he does not always do anymore at sixteen.

We sat there until the porch light came on by itself, and the boys started waking up and going home.

The crew was on my field at six the next morning. The crew boss was out in front with his gray mustache and his forearms.

He tipped his cap at me when he walked past. He did not say anything about the day before, and neither did I.

They picked my field first the rest of that summer. Every load, every week, my melons went on the truck before Tammy’s, before Dwayne’s.

Nobody ever told me Dwayne had said it, but nobody ever needed to.

Tammy came by the house once in August. She stood in the drive with her hands folded in front of her and said she was sorry, that she had not known what Dwayne had done until after.

I believed her. I gave her a jar of my mother’s pickles.

Colt started two-a-days the next week. His coach told me at the first game in September that he had never seen Colt’s hands so quick on a pass set.

Colt told him it was the melons, and his coach thought he was joking.

Bryce made the varsity line that fall, a sophomore, the youngest one on it. He was still thin as a fence post.

But he did not miss a block all season that I saw, and I watched every game from the top row.

I still have the scale ticket. Nadine mailed it to me with a note that said, “For your scrapbook.”

It is in the kitchen drawer with the seed receipts and the boys’ school pictures.

I take it out sometimes. It is just a slip of paper with a number on it. But that is not what I see when I look at it.

I see seven people in a hot field, and three men walking across a road, and a quiet boy catching a melon.

The load weighed 43,000 pounds, and Dwayne’s crew picked my field first the rest of the summer.