The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

I had cut the first two rows myself at daybreak, before I called Dwayne, so the melons were already lying loose in the rows.

I put Colt at the far end of the line, where the melons came up off the ground, because he was the strongest.

Then the two juniors, then Amos, then Isaiah. Bryce went next to me at the wagon.

I would stand at the trailer door and hand up to Nadine, who said she would stack until her back quit and then a while past that.

The trailer could not come down into the rows. A loaded semi on soft sand will sink to the axles.

So we used the old hay wagon with plywood sides that had been my dad’s, and my little tractor, and we filled the wagon in the rows.

Then we pulled the full wagon to the trailer and pitched it all over again, from the wagon to me and from me up into the trailer to Nadine.

Every melon was handled six or seven times before it was in that load.

“Underhand,” I told the boys. “Soft. Both hands. Like a medicine ball, not like a football. You toss it to his chest, and he catches it against his chest, and he turns and tosses it to the next man.”

“How heavy are they,” one of the juniors asked.

“Fifteen to twenty pounds most of them,” I said. “Some will go twenty five. If you feel it slipping, hug it. A cracked melon is worth nothing to anybody but the hogs.”

The first melon came up off the ground in Colt’s hands. He turned and tossed it to the first junior, who caught it like a lineman catches anything, with his whole body.

He tossed it to the next boy, and on down the line.

It came to Isaiah, and Isaiah tossed it to Bryce. Bryce reached for it with both hands open, and it went right through them and hit the wagon bed with a hollow thump and split clean open.

The red ran out across the boards. Bryce stood there looking down at it with his hands still out in front of him.

His face went red all the way to his ears, redder than the melon.

He was the quiet one. He had always been the one who was afraid of being the one who messed up.

He had been that way since he was four years old and spilled his milk at Thanksgiving and cried for an hour.

Nobody said anything for a second. Then Isaiah started clapping. Slow at first, just his big gloved hands, and then Amos picked it up, and the two juniors, and Colt at the far end of the line.

“That one was the warmup,” Colt called down the row. “That one does not count. Come on, Bryce. Next one.”

Bryce looked at his brother. Then he wiped his gloves on his jeans and held his hands out again, closer to his chest this time.

The next melon came down the line, and he caught it, and turned, and tossed it to me.

He did not drop another one. Not that morning, not that afternoon, not all summer.

I watched him the whole day, and every melon that came to him, he held like it was his own.