The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

I had to look away for a minute, out over the vines, because I did not want those boys to see me cry before nine o’clock in the morning.

My mother saw it. She was standing by the water jugs, and she just nodded at me.

We found our rhythm by nine thirty. It was not the crew’s rhythm.

It was slower and clumsier, and every so often somebody would say “Got it” when he did not have it. But the melons kept coming.

The sun got up over the trees, and the heat came off the sand the way it does along the Wabash in July.

By ten o’clock it was ninety one degrees on the thermometer by the shed, and the air was thick enough to wring.

The boys’ T-shirts were soaked through. They pulled them off and wrung them out and put them back on.

My mother walked the line with a cooler of ice water and a stack of paper cups and made every one of them drink.

“You drink this,” she would say, and hold the cup out until the boy took it.

“I do not care if you are thirsty. You drink it. I have buried enough people to know what heat does.”

At ten thirty we had the first wagon unloaded into the trailer and the second one filling.

Nadine had laid the bottom row from the front wall out, each melon on its side, stem end toward the wall, packed tight so they could not roll.

She stacked them in layers like that, four and five high, building back toward the doors.

She did it on her knees, and then crouching, and then standing as the stack rose. She did not complain once.

“You are doing fine,” she told me when I handed her up a melon.

“You are slower than the crew, but you are not breaking any. That is what counts. A clean load at two beats a broken one at noon.”

At eleven I went to the shed and did the figures in pencil on the back of a seed bag.

We had about nine hundred melons in the trailer and the wagon. We needed about fifteen hundred more, and it was not yet noon.

The crew would have had it nearly done by then. We were going at about three hundred an hour in the trailer, maybe three fifty when we were moving well.

That was going to put us at four in the afternoon, not two.

I came back out to the line, and Colt saw my face. He did not ask.

He just said to the boys, “Pick it up a little, guys. Not faster hands. Fewer steps. Stand closer together.”

They stood closer together. It helped some. The line got shorter and the tosses got shorter, and the melons moved a little quicker.

But it was still not three fifty an hour, not with the wagon to fill and haul and empty.

“We are not going to make two,” I said to Nadine when I handed up the next melon. “We are going to be close, but we are not going to make two.”