The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

You know it is ripe when the little curly tendril nearest the stem has dried brown and the spot where it sat on the ground has gone from white to a creamy yellow.

Then the pitchers make a line. The first man picks the melon up out of the row and tosses it underhand to the next man, and that man tosses it to the next, and on down the line to the wagon or the trailer.

At the trailer one man stands inside and stacks. That is the job that matters most.

A melon laid wrong in the bottom row cracks under the ones on top of it, and a cracked melon in a load can start a whole row of them leaking.

Our crew could load a semi in about three and a half hours with eight men.

They had done it so long that the melons flew down that line like a bucket brigade. They never seemed to look at their hands at all.

I had seven people, counting myself. Two of them were my own boys, and four of them were teenagers who had never pitched a watermelon in their lives. My mother would carry water. That was what I had.

Nadine Oakes came up the field road at five till eight with her trailer empty and the doors already open.

She was fifty two, gray hair in a braid down her back, and she had hauled my melons and Dwayne’s for nine years.

She swung down out of the cab and looked at the field, and then she looked at me, and then she looked at the empty field road where the crew vans should have been parked.

“Where is everybody,” she said.

“Tammy’s patch,” I said.

Nadine did not say a word about Dwayne. She just pressed her lips together and nodded slowly.

Then she said, “I unload at a warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, tonight, and receiving closes at ten. Two is the latest I can roll and still have room for Indianapolis traffic.”

“I know it,” I said. “I will have it on there by two.”

She looked at me a long time. Then she climbed up into the trailer and started laying cardboard on the floor and up the front wall, the way we always did, so the bottom melons had something to sit on besides bare boards.

At eight fifteen a dusty pickup came up the road with four boys in it. Isaiah Pruett drove.

He was seventeen, a center, built square, with a farm kid’s sunburned neck. Amos was the long snapper. The two juniors from the right side came too.

They piled out with water bottles and ball caps. One of the juniors was still eating a sausage biscuit.

They stood at the end of the row and looked at the field the way boys look at a weight room the first day of summer.

“Mrs. Ferrell,” Isaiah said. “Colt says you need a line. We have never done this. You will have to tell us where to stand.”

I had on a white T-shirt and my old blue ball cap, the one so faded it was nearly white at the bill.

I pulled on my tan work gloves. And I told them where to stand.