The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

If I pushed the load, the buyer would give that truck to someone else. Then he would wonder about my second load, and my third.

And my melons would not wait a day either. They were ready that morning, not the next one.

A semi does not wait for an argument. I could have called him back ten times.

I could have driven over to Oaktown and stood in Tammy’s field and made a scene. None of it would have put one melon in that trailer by two o’clock.

So I hung up. I did not call him back. I walked up to the house and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at my two sons eating cereal at the table.

Colt was eighteen, six foot three and two hundred and sixty pounds, the starting left tackle for the high school.

He had a buzz cut for the summer and a red mesh practice jersey, already damp at the collar from the first hour of the morning.

Bryce was sixteen. He was the quiet one, thin as a fence post, a sophomore who had gone out for the line because his brother did.

He still read at the table and still let his cereal go soggy while he did it.

“The crew is not coming,” I said. “Your dad sent them to Tammy’s. Nadine is backing in at eight, and the truck leaves at two.”

Colt set his spoon down. He looked at me for a long moment, and I could see him doing the arithmetic in his head the way his father taught him to do it, rows and melons and hours.

“How many are we loading,” he said.

“About twenty four hundred,” I said. “Eighteen pounds on average. That is a full load, a little over forty thousand pounds.”

My mother, Loretta, was at the stove frying eggs. She was seventy four and had lived with us since my dad died.

She turned the burner off, wiped her hands on her apron, and said, “Well, I can carry water.”

Colt already had his phone out. Summer weights were done for the week, and practice did not start until Monday. He was texting before I had finished my coffee.

“Who are you calling,” I said.

“Isaiah,” he said. “Amos. The two juniors from the right side of the line. They will be up already. Coach has had us up at six all summer anyway.”

“Colt, those boys have their own families and their own summers.”

“Mom,” he said. “It is a load of melons. It is not a funeral. They will come.”

Bryce had put his book face down on the table. He did not say anything.

He went to the mud room and came back with two pairs of cotton work gloves, and he handed one pair to his brother.

I want to tell you what it was like out there, because people who have not done it think melons get loaded by a machine.

Most of them do not. Most of them are picked and pitched by hand, the same way they were when my grandfather grew them.

You walk the rows ahead and cut each ripe melon from the vine.