The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

Nadine took the melon and laid it in the stack. She did not look at me.

She looked at her watch, and then at the field, and then at her cab, where she kept her logbook and her phone.

“Three,” she said. “I can hold it until three. That is the most I can give you. If I roll at three, I can still back into that dock before ten, but I will not be stopping to eat.”

“Nadine, I cannot ask you to do that.”

“You did not ask,” she said. “I offered. I hauled for your dad when I was twenty five years old. He fed me supper at that table more times than I can count. Hand me another melon.”

My mother had made sandwiches, ham and cheese on white bread, a whole loaf.

At a quarter to twelve she set them out on the tailgate of my pickup with a jar of pickles and a bag of potato chips.

“Five minutes,” I told the boys. “Eat standing up if you have to. Drink more water than you think you need. Then back to it.”

My mother bowed her head over the tailgate before anybody touched a sandwich. She did not make a speech of it.

She just said, “Lord, thank you for these boys and for this food, and help us get it done. Amen.”

The boys said amen with their mouths already full. Isaiah said it twice. My mother smiled at him like he was her own grandson, and she pushed the pickle jar toward him.

I was eating my sandwich and looking across the road at the home place, the house Dwayne and I had built, the shed, the old maple by the drive.

His field was across the road, too, the melons he had not picked yet.

That was when I saw them. Three men had come out of Dwayne’s shed and were standing at the edge of the blacktop with their lunch coolers.

They were looking at my field. They were looking at my line.

I knew them. I had known them for years. The oldest of the three had been the crew boss since Colt was in diapers.

He had a gray mustache and the forearms of a man who had pitched melons for thirty years.

They stood there for maybe a full minute. Then the oldest one set his lunch cooler down in the grass on the shoulder of the road.

He said something to the other two that I could not hear. And they started walking across the road.

I stood there with half a sandwich in my hand. Colt saw them, too. He set his water down. None of the boys said a word. They had stopped chewing.

The oldest man came up to the end of my line. His face was dusty and his shirt was wet through, the same as ours.

He looked at the wagon, and at the trailer, and at the boys, and at Bryce.

Then he looked at me. “Tammy’s patch is done for today,” he said.

“We finished at eleven thirty. Dwayne said we could have an hour for lunch. We do not need an hour to eat a sandwich.”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.